Email Marketing Statistics and Optimization of Open / Click Rates

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A quick post to share with my readers some interesting findings regarding email marketing. Outlined by the ninth bi-annual Email Marketing Metrics Report by MailerMailer, these data is based on 300,000 email messages dispatched over a period of 6 months that ended on December 31, 2008. Here are some key statistic discoveries from the report that can be used to optimize your email marketing campaigns and improve the results.

Open rate — the overall unique open rate of the email messages was 12.52%, a slight decline from the previous 6 months.

Click rate — 2.8% which held steady throughout the year of 2008.

Best day to send — Monday had the highest open rate and click rate; weekends and the beginning of the week outperforms other days.

Subject line length — emails with a subject line shorter than 35 characters were opened more than those with a longer subject line.

Personalization — while personalizing the message body gets more opens and clicks, personalizing only the subject line decreases them.

Number of recipients — messages delivered to small and medium lists have far greater open / click rates than ones delivered to lists with more than 1,000 subscribers.

I personally haven’t tapped into email marketing yet and the 12.52% average open rate was way below what I thought it would be, which may be because of the trends in email clients disabling automatic image download by default. It’s both interesting and useful to know that we should send out important email newsletters on weekends or Monday and try to make the subject lines not so cumbersome to garner more opens and clicks.