This wiki is managed by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights to help keep marketers up-to-date with developments in digital marketing
Email Response Statistics
From Marketing Online
Email marketers want to compare the performance of their campaigns in terms of open, clickthrough and delivery rates, ideally against competitors in the same industry sector. Benchmark compilations of email open and clickthrough are available from a range of Email Service Providers summarised below.
Smart Insights 2010 Email Marketing Advice
See our Smart Insights blog for best practice updates from Dave Chaffey and our expert commentators on email marketing strategy and practice. We're focusing a lot of examples on integration of email marketing with social media currently.
Email Service Provider compilations
Many of these compilations provide recent examples of response by industry vertical, but care has to be taken in interpreting due to differences in sample size and country where majority of subscribers based. These examples are the ESPs that publish regular compilations.
- Silverpop Email Creative that Works Requires registration, but worthwhile since suggests effect of main design and copy elements - subject line, from, template structure and copy length
- Epsilon Trends and Benchmarks This is a large-scale Global survey based on 6 billion emails sent by Epsilon in Q1 (January – March)
2009, across multiple industries and more than 200 clients.This is the figure presented top right.
- Mailer Mailer Email Metrics last updated H2 2009 - This has open and clickthrough rates by vertical based on aggregate statistics from over 300 million email messages across over 3,000 permission-based email senders (mainly US based). Also has interesting information on impact of subject line length and personalisation.
- Bronto Stats Bronto is a US-based ESP with a compilation of open, clickthrough and delivery rates
- Sign-Up.to UK response rates A relatively small sample of 216 million emails sent in 12 months to July 2009.
Perceptions of permission based email marketing
Deliverability statistics
- ReturnPath Deliverability reports 2009 updates on Deliverability statistics for US and Deliverability Statistics for Europe
Email response by email client or webmail service
- 2009 comparison of Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, & AOL email open, clickthrough, delivery, unsubscribe and complaint rates Report from MailCimp a US-based ESP with international users
- Email webmail/client consumer usage - from Mark Brownlows's Excellent Email Marketing Reports which has many other statistics and tests on email response
Trade association Email Open and Clickthrough country compilations
These don't tend to be freely available. The best overall compilation for members is available through the UK National Email Marketing Benchmarking Survey which is available to members of the UK Direct Marketing Association. It compiles data from across all the major UK Email Service Providers (ESPs), but has a considerable timelag before publication compared to the examples below.
- DMA UK Benchmarking Survey Executive summary contains report extracts only
- Email Experience Council A range of best practice reports from vendors but limited for compilations of statistics
Email-based security threats
- MessageLabs Intelligence MessageLabs is a corporate email service, now owned by Symantec - its monthly bulletin has the rates of spam (around 80 to 90%), Phishing, Viruses and Trojans.
