What’s working in emails? MailerMailer email marketing report (June 2009)

I’ve just found a great email marketing report from MailerMailer (published June 2009) that provides an overview of what is happening with email stats for emails sent through their system. I’d recommend a quick skim over the report, but if you don’t have time I’ve done it for you (see summary and key stats below).

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WHAT DOES THE REPORT SAY?

Most people will open their emails in the first 24hrs, but only a small percentage will click through to the content (less than 3%). It’s best to send emails on a weekend or Monday with a subject line under 35 characters. Personalisation needs to be more than just the subject line.

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WHAT ARE THE STATS?

As a top line summary, here are the key findings:

1. How Soon Do People Open Their Email?
74.5% of opens occur within the first 24 hours and 84.3% occur within the first 48 hours.

2. Open Rates
The overall unique open rates stand at 12.52% which is a marginal decline from the 13.20% open rate experienced in the first half of 2008.

3. Click Through Rates
Click rates held steady. Subscriber clicks in the second half of 2008 were comparable to those in the previous six months, rising a mere 0.08%.

4. Best Days to Send
Though weekends and the beginning of the week outperform the other days, Monday is the clear winner having both the highest open rate and click rate.

5. Subject Lines
Yet again, emails with subject lines shorter than 35 characters were opened more than emails with subject lines longer than 35 characters.

6 .Personalization
Personalization can be good. Data shows when only the message is personalized, there are more opens and clicks. However, emails with only the subject line personalized garnered the least amount of opens and clicks.

7. Deliverability
For the second year now, deliverability continues to increase and bounces continue to decrease. This means more messages are reaching recipients’ inbox.

8. Number of Recipients
Messages delivered to small and medium lists have far greater open and click rates than messages delivered to lists containing 1000 or more subscribers. A smaller list does not directly affect open and click rates, but mailings to smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content or have more recent subscribers.

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WHO HAS THE BEST OPEN & CLICK THROUGH RATES?
Here are the trends in open rates and click through rates by day, you can see that Sunday and Monday are the most popular.

Email Open & Click Through Rates

In previous reports, it has been recommended to send emails on Tuesday at around 11am. Obviously this trend has changed.

Having a look at the click through rates by industry shows that religious and spiritual emails have the highest click through and travel related emails are next.

Email Click Through Rates by Industry

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WHAT WORKS IN SUBJECT LINES?
Below is a word cloud of the most popular subject lines. They centre around news, party, free, holiday, weekend and night.

Popular Subject Lines in Emails

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DOES PERSONALISATION MATTER?
It’s interesting to look at personalisation and how it effects open rates and click through rates.

Email Open & Click Through Rates based on Personalisation

Key take out is that you need to do more than just personalise the subject line.

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HOW MANY LINKS MATTERS?
The more links in an email that subscribers can click through to, the more likely they are to click through. I know it sounds pretty straight forward, but not sure if I would want over 20 links in an email just to encourage me to click through.

Email Click Through Rates based on number of Links

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