59 per cent of new subscribers are not reading emails: Epsilon

The report covered 7.3 billion emails sent by Epsilon across multiple industries for about 170 clients in the second quarter. Epsilon was unable to clarify in time for this report if all the emails were sent within North America, or if the lists were global.

(Edit 17/09/2012: Epsilon responded that figures cited in the report are exclusively for North America but that the email benchmarks can serve as a reference for marketers worldwide.)

According to the study, the overall open rate of ‘business-as-usual’ (BAU) emails was 25.6 per cent, more than 15 per cent higher than the same quarter in the previous year. However, click rates decreased about 5.2 per cent from 2011.

The way forward for direct marketers is to focus on segmentation, onboarding and welcome strategies, recommended the report. The analysis of 193 million ‘triggered messages’ sent by Epsilon found that the open rates for these emails were 94.8 per cent higher than BAU emails.

Triggered messages are deployed as a result of an action or trigger such as ‘welcome’, ‘abandoned shopping cart’, ‘thank you’ and ‘anniversary’.

These emails also draw much higher click rates, reporting 122.1 per cent higher rates than BAU, also an increase over 2Q2011, which showed an 88.6 per cent lift over BAU.

Overall, triggered messages accounted for 2.6 per cent of total direct marketing volume, an increase of 22 per cent from the previous year.

"While the average business-as-usual email volume decreased 6 per cent in the second quarter of 2012, we've seen a 14 per cent increase in triggered email volume," said Linda A. Woolley, DMA's acting president and CEO. "This illustrates that direct marketers are evolving their email contact strategies to meet the changing needs and preferences of their consumers and responding to specific actions and behaviour."