A year later: are they still clicking on your e-mail?

The answer to this question depends on who's stats you read and what you see happening to your own lists. I personally have seen my open rate go down fifty percent in just the last year. Colleagues at a recent Newsletter & Electronic Publishers Association luncheon corroborated my findings with theirs. Yet if you read through two major sources on email stats you find conflicting reports.

Let me walk you through some of the discrepancies and you can go to the actual sources and see for yourself in more detail.

1) Click Through Rate--Steady or Decreasing?

Email Sherpa published a brief overview on November 4th of last year entitled: ANNUAL DATA REPORT: 2293 Marketers Share Real-life Campaign Stats & Plans for 2005 we are quoted the variances of marketers' experiences. It's hard to determine whether these marketers are quoting from scientific objective data or from anecdotal recall. Yet the overall consensus Email Sherpa reaches in its write up is that clickthrough remains steady for house lists because 50% of the marketers say there is no big change to their house lists.

Meanwhile, DoubleClick, in its Email Trend Report Q3 2004 which tracks two billion messages sent by its clients reports otherwise. There is no distinction made between house and third party lists. What Doubleclick does report is that the average click-through rate (8.2%) decreased 10.9% from, Q3 2003 to 9.2%

Email Sherpa shares marketers' responses to what were this year's most popular clickthrough rate answers:

* Newsletter articles sent to your house list--6-10% CTR

* Free offers sent to your house list--6-10% CTR

* Sales offers to your house list--3-5% CTR

* Anything sent to 3rd party lists--0-2% CTR

Perphaps these stats can serve as some informal benchmark for you.

2) What May Be Driving the Numbers Down

It's definitely worth reading the whole Doubleclick report--it's all of four pages and FREE. The most interesting point that I found in their conclusions had to do with the effect of increasing mail files. To quote the report, "Newer customers (who typically tend to be more responsive) now represent smaller and smaller proportions of total subscribers on file, potentially driving overall declines in response in most categories."

So it sounds like segementing your files might well be worth it even by the age of the record itself. Having six million names on files may seem like a lot of data "wealth" when what it could mean is that you're loaded down with just a lot of digital baggage.

For The EmailSherpa Report Summary (full report for a fee) click here.

For the Doubleclick Report click here.