E-mail bounce backs were higher than ever in the second quarter of this year, according to the DoubleClick E-Mail Trend Report released yesterday.
Bounce-back rates have risen since third-quarter 2001 and reached an average of 12.6 percent in the second quarter, the report said. Business products and services e-mails had the highest rate at 19 percent and business publishers the lowest at 8.6 percent.
Results were based on 1.7 billion permission-based e-mails from hundreds of clients delivered through DoubleClick's DARTmail messaging platform in the second quarter, the firm said. Trends were identified through analysis of data from the previous six quarters.
The report included data on open rates, click-through rates and message format response rates.
Business products and services e-mails had the highest open rates at 47.4 percent, followed by travel at 42.5 percent. The average open rate across categories was 37.6 percent.
Consumer products and services e-mails had the highest click-through rates at 9.4 percent, followed by consumer publishers at 9.1 percent and travel at 8.4 percent. The average click-through rate across categories was 7.5 percent.
The report showed that e-mail messages in HTML format generated better response rates than text messages. Response rates were 1.2 to 1.7 times higher for HTML than text e-mails for all industry categories. The overall click-through rate for industry text e-mails was 7 percent, while HTML e-mails was 10 percent.
In other findings, Tuesday was the most popular day for sending e-mail at 23.6 percent, followed by Wednesday at 22.7 percent, Thursday at 18.2 percent and Monday at 16.8 percent.
