Report: E-mail Marketing Holds Steady in Q2

E-mail marketers continued to see open and click-through rates hold steady in the second quarter, according to figures compiled by DoubleClick .

The advertising technology company’s second-quarter e-mail trends report found that open rates averaged 38.8 percent, a 3.2 percent increase from a year earlier and virtually unchanged from the first quarter. Click-through rates were 8.3 percent, a 10.7 percent increase from the year-ago period and 7 percent lower than in the first quarter. Delivery rates remained mostly unchanged at 88.5 percent with bounce rates declining for the third straight quarter.

“I think we can glean that much like last quarter there continues to be a lot of stability” in e-mail marketing, said Eric Kirby, vice president of strategic services at DoubleClick.

DoubleClick collected the data from the more than 2 billion marketing e-mails it sent out for clients during the quarter.

In industry categories, business products and services saw open rates fall 4 percent, from 47.4 percent to 45.3 percent, but click-through rates rose a healthy 24 percent, from 7.5 percent to 9.3 percent. Retail and catalog campaigns increased open rates 11.4 percent to 37 percent and click-through rates by 9.8 percent to 6.7 percent. Travel e-mail saw both key rates hold slight improvements, with an open rate of 44.5 percent and a click-through rate of 9.3 percent.

E-mail marketing began improving its productivity, too. On average, the DoubleClick campaigns saw orders per e-mail delivered coming in at .29 percent versus .25 percent a year earlier. The average order size, however, decreased 4.1 percent to $98.48 from $102.

Kirby said the steady, if unspectacular, performance was a result of e-mail marketers growing more sophisticated about the medium by engaging in best practices like frequent list hygiene and clear subject lines.

“These types of companies are continuing to evolve their e-mail communications,” he said. “They’re managing to stay one step ahead of [the spam problem].”