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December 2002 |
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By: Joop Rijk, Editor |
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List Management Still A Major Challenge
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Email Broadcast Remains Effective Marketing Tool
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A recent study by DoubleClick shows that email open rates and email clickthrough rates have remained the steady despite the rise in email volume. Clickthrough rates for email campaigns delivered through Doubleclicks email delivery platform, during the 3rd quarter of 2002, where 6.1 percent compare to 4.9 percent in the 2nd quarter of the year. Bounceback rates decreased from 12.6 percent in the 2nd quarter to 11.2 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2002. Email broadcast campaigns selling business products and services continue to garner the highest open rate, averaging 47.4 percent.
List Maintenance
Email address switching has resulted in millions of undeliverable messages. As a result list maintenance or list hygiene has become one of the major challenges email marketers are facing today. A survey among 1,015 U.S. e-mail users, conducted by the NFO WorldGroup during August 2002, revealed that 49 percent had changed either a work or personal e-mail address. Of the 43 percent of respondents who had changed their personal e-mail address, half of them cited an ISP switch as the main reason for the change; 16 percent blamed spam; 12 percent changed residences; and 8 percent wanted a more attractive e-mail address. Work e-mail addresses most often changed due to new jobs (41 percent), followed by an ISP change (18 percent), a change of residence (8 percent), and a name change resulting from a marriage or divorce (6 percent).
HTML Email
DoubleClick found that HTML e-mail remains a far more effective marketing tool then text-only email messages. HTML email messages garnered an 11.3 percent click-through rate versus a 6 percent click-through for text messages. However, HTML's growth has slowed. In the third quarter, it made up 43.6 percent of marketing messages sent, an increase of just 1 percent from the precious quarter.
Broken Links
Bounced email messages and list maintenance are only one of the problems that e-marketers face. Silverpop found that unreadable HTML e-mails with broken links can cause a major reduction in response rates. A November study by the company evaluated several potential causes for reduced response rates for permission e-mail marketing. According to the study half of all HTML e-mails being sent today contain errors such as broken links, graphics or unreadable HTML coding in e-mail messages. The study reviewed messages sent by US companies from nine different industries. 450 companies were initially included in the study, and 1,327 e-mail mesages were analyzed in nine popular e-mail clients.
The Silverpop study revealed that 20 percent of the reviewed HTML e-mail messages had 5 broken components; 9 percent had more than 5 broken components; 7 percent had extremely disruptive errors; and 6 percent were completely indecipherable. Just over half (58 percent) of the 1,400 e-mails that were analyzed were rendered properly.
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