Best Practices In Strategic Email Marketing October 2005

Technique
The truth behind declining Email Metrics
By Randall Litchfield

It is no secret that email response rates have been in decline for more than a year now. A popular yardstick is the quarterly DoubleClick Email Trend Report. DoubleClick is perhaps the largest email vendor in the world, sending the largest volume of commercial messages. Below is how their overall metrics are trending:

As you can see, Deliverability - the top line - has actually improved, and Click Rates have declined marginally. The biggest drop has been in Open Rates, falling from an average of near 40% in 2003 to 28% in 2005 (measured over billions of messages and hundreds of thousands of campaigns.)

What does it mean?

Interpreting declining Open Rates is more art than science, but we can be fairly certain about at least two factors:

  • Email Fatigue - This is a rapidly maturing medium. More than 70% of North Americans now have email addresses. Many of us have used the channel since the mid-1990s and the advent of the Web, and email volume is now orders of magnitude higher. Bottom line? We've seen it all and are less likely to open.

  • Message Blocking - Deliverability is up due to the painstaking efforts us legitimate email marketers make in adhering to email best practices. But this doesn't cover the untold millions of messages blocked by spam filters and dumped into junk folders and 'blackholes'. These don't record as a hard bounce; they just disappear. Some ISPs block more than others, and some studies suggest that as much as 20-30% of total commercial messaging ends in junk folders. When this happens, the telltale sign is the declining open rate. People can't open what they can't see.

What can you do about it?

The main thing you can do about declining email performance is to get as much help as you can. Fortunately, help resides in a number of places. You are already a subscriber of this Best Practices newsletter, so that was a good start. Other excellent sources are:

Also, don't forget about 'the managed email dividend' and that a good email service provider can raise your email performance far above industry averages. Average Inbox Marketer Open Rates, for example, are currently 38% - more than 10% above the broad industry average. And our click rates are double!