E-mail open and click-through rates often hinge on whether subject lines and message content are descriptive enough, according to a new study.
E-marketing services company BlueStreak, Providence, RI, studied e-mail marketing leaders — those who have open rates surpassing 45 percent and click-through rates of almost three times the industry average — with “average” e-mail marketers.
In the BlueStreak Email Benchmarks study, the company found that leaders are up to three times more likely than the average to test subject lines for campaigns. Their subject lines are slightly longer than average, which is 38.3 characters.
Leaders are also more descriptive in message content, including 60 words more than the average in their messages. Leaders use more than 27 links per message to encourage calls to action, compared with the average of 19.
E-mail marketing leaders also keep cleaner lists, BlueStreak said yesterday. They have more than 80 percent deliverable addresses compared with less than 75 percent for average e-mail marketers.
“BTB marketers tend to be the laggards and consistently have the least deliverable lists, with more than 26 percent of addresses being invalid,” the BlueStreak report said.
Leaders emerged in specific industries, too. Healthcare marketers achieved the highest open rates at 57.8 percent, the study said, while the travel and hospitality sector had 46.5 percent open rates and telecommunication and ISP firms had 44.7 percent.
Healthcare companies also had the highest click-through rates at 11.4 percent, but consumer goods manufacturers and brands were a close second, with a 10.2 percent.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
