The FINANCIAL — Email has become a ubiquitous form of online communication for consumers and businesses alike writes eMarketer.
According to Yahoo! and Ipsos OTX MediaCT, the typical US internet user averages more than two personal email accounts, leaving marketers with ample opportunity to reach clients and prospects.
Marketers are capitalizing on this opportunity. Findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) showed 94% of US marketers were either using or planned to use email marketing as of November 2010, pointing to a highly adopted, mature communication format. Quarterly findings from Epsilon and the Email Experience Council further evidenced a well-established online format, showing only slight percentage differences for key email marketing metrics like clickthrough rate (CTR) and open rate in North America over the past two years.
And with email’s maturation comes clarity. Marketers can state with certainty that different types of email messages do influence overall CTR and open rate.
According to Epsilon and the Email Experience Council, emails that provided distinct value to consumers—whether in the form of service-related messages or editorial content—continued to outperform other email marketing communications types in both CTR and open rate during Q2 2011.
Epsilon defined service-oriented emails as those that include some form of account or service-related messaging—anything from billing to account-specific correspondence. Because these are often critical forms of communication, it’s unsurprising that consumers were more likely to open these than more general forms of marketing communication.
Editorial messages included articles and other industry-related information that likely piqued the interest of consumers by providing value in the form of education, entertainment or additional knowledge.
This type of information is often shared during the lead nurture process, which helps marketers to keep customers and prospects interested in their company by providing value beyond promotional marketing messaging. This approach typically employs a more targeted way of segmenting recipients based on interests, which increases relevancy, ultimately boosting open rate and CTR.
Overall, North American consumers are opening emails with the same frequency but clicking in emails a little less often, as evidenced in the slight decrease in CTR over the past two years. Before Q1 2010, CTR hovered around 6%. Since then, CTR has settled around 5.3%, except for a slight increase seen in Q1 2011.
Open rate also saw a slight increase in performance for Q1 2011, a full percentage point higher than the typical average open rate of most quarters.
The increase in performance for Q1 2011 could have been part of a larger seasonality trend, particularly considering the similar increases in Q1 2010 and Q1 2009, which showed a steady open rate of 22.1% and a CTR of 6.1%. More data would be needed to verify such a trend.
One trend that is clear is that marketers are fighting for these engagement rates through ever-fuller inboxes. Radicati Group reported in December 2010 that the average consumer received 32 emails per day that year. For marketers to have theirs opened, relevance and genuine value to the recipient are key.
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