“Email Marketing Metrics Report” – 2009 from MailerMailer represents a must-read publication for people interested in email marketing.  The 38-page report is filled with charts, tips and data that provides businesses with relevant information to help them adjust their email marketing strategy to cater to their audience’s changing needs. Here are the main findings for this report:

• Email marketing open rates by industry and list size

Unique opens are calculated as the number of addresses which were tracked as having viewed a message divided by the total number of HTML messages sent. Each address, even if it opened the message more than once, was counted only once; hence, showing unique opens.

Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies.

“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,” wrote the authors of the report.

• Email marketing click rates by industry and list size
  

Click rates are defined as the total number of unique clicks (i.e., the first time a person clicks on a link) divided by the total number of opportunities to click. It is calculated as follows: the total number of unique clicks divided by the product of the number of links in each message and the number of total recipients.

Click-through rates for lists of over 1,000 recipients were also highest for religious e-mails, followed by travel, general consumer and retail.

Other findings:

• Most popular terms in subject lines:

1. news
2. party
3. newsletter
4. free
5. night
6. sale
7. com
8. update
9. holiday
10. week

• 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.
• Subject lines – Emails with subject lines shorter than 35 characters were opened more than emails with subject lines longer than 35 characters.
• How soon do people open their email? – 74.5% of opens occur within the first 24 hours and 84.3% occurs within the first 48 hours.

Full report can be downloaded for free at http://www.mailermailer.com/metrics.rwp.

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