The USA DMA’s EEC and Espilon have released the Q2 2012 report called “Q2 2012 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks ” which includes email marketing engagement from 7.3 billion emails sent by Epsilon in April, May & June 2012.
They have introduced a new email marketing metric called Email Activity Segment Evaluation (EASE), which is supposed to (easily) measure unengagement list subscribers. In the case of Q2 2012, 59% of new email subscribers are unengaged.
Other key findings from the email trends & benchmarks report include the following:
– Non-bounce rate was very good at 95,9%.
– Open rates slipped slightly quarter over quarter at -2,5%, but overall increase over Q2 2011 at 15,2% – which meant an overall 25,6% open rate.
– A slight decrease in click rates of 0,3% compared to last quarter, down to 4,4%. The click rate is also lower than Q2 2011 (5,2%), but on average stable over the past two years.
The aforementioned Email Activity Segment Evaluation (EASE) metric, which examines the overall performance over time of an average email list or segment, showed the following results:
– Nearly two thirds (59%) of new subscribers in an average list, have no opens or clicks since opting-in.
– Approximately 27% of subscribers in an average email list have opened or clicked in the most recent three months.
– Seeing a strong improvement since 2009, 23% of subscribers who have been on an email list three months or longer have opened and/or clicked within the most recent three months.
Triggered emails are also part of the report, with a total of 193 million being used in the benchmark. The highlights:
– Triggered open rates were 94.8% higher than BAU. This is an increase over the previous quarter (75%) and the previous year (82.1%).
– Triggered messages accounted for 2.6% of total volume, 22.0% higher than Q211 (2.1%) and 14% higher than Q112 (2.3%).
– Triggered click rates continued to perform well, reporting 122.1% higher than BAU. Q211 triggered click rates showed an 88.6% lift over BAU.
A quote from the article at the DMA website:
While the average business-as-usual email volume decreased 6% in the second quarter of 2012, we’ve seen a 14% 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 behaviors.
The complete report is available for download at the Epsilon website.
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