Email Marketing: The First 48 Hours Are Critical

The next time you broadcast a permission-based email to your customers, members or newsletter subscribers, monitor your response for the next 48 hours.

That's when the vast majority—80%—of those who would open your message will actually open it, according to the results of our recent study. What's more, 95% of people who read your message do so within six days of your mailing.

The "Email Marketing Use and Trends Report: H1 2004" shows performance by industry for the first half of 2004, based on over 70 million opt-in email messages sent by MailerMailer customers. It includes delivery/bounce rates, unique open rates, click-through rates by industry; open and click rates by day of the week; and the effect of personalized subject lines and messages on open and click rates.

Delivery/Bounce Rates

An email message may bounce if a subscriber changes his or her email address without notifying you, if it is inadvertently flagged as spam or if the receiving server is down. For all industries, the average bounce rate for customers' first five mailings was 6.60%. For subsequent mailings, after bad addresses were removed, it went down to 3.59%.

These industries had the lowest bounce rate (and therefore highest delivery rates) for their first five mailings: government (2.41%), wholesale (3.80%), and real estate (4.19%).

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Raj Khera is a partner in MailerMailer (www.mailermailer.com).