Image from MailerMailer.com
MailerMailer.com released a report with a sample size for the data used to create this report is over 900 million email messages. This is a subset of the messages sent through MailerMailer between January 1 and December 31, 2009.
But I thought email was dead…
No email isn’t dead. It’s alive and well. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email continues to deliver the highest return on investment (ROI) of any other marketing channel, at $43.62 for each dollar spent in 2009. This figure is more than twice the ROI from Internet search advertising, which came in second at $21.85 per dollar spent.
Forrester Research recently reported that spending on email marketing in the United States is expected to expand to $2 billion by 2014; this is an annual compound growth rate of nearly 11%.
A MarketingSherpa survey found that email is one of only two tactics where more marketers increased budgets than decreased budgets in 2009. The other was social media.
More from the report:
- Best Days to Send – Email messages sent on Sunday have the best chance of being opened and clicked on.
- Open Rates – The overall unique open rate stands at 11.2%, which is a 10% decline from last year at this time.
- Open Rates by Industry – The agricultural and telecommunications sectors are generating the highest open rates (25% or more), while the mining industry is showing open rates of less than 5%.
- Open Rates by List Size – Smaller lists (fewer than 499 email addresses) garnered higher open rates than medium sized lists (17.8%) or large (more than 1,000 email addresses) lists (14.3%).
- Subject Lines – Once again, email messages with subject lines of 35 characters or less outperformed emails with longer subject lines, generating open rates 52% higher and click rates 69% higher, on average