Those Were The (Email) Days
August 30th, 2011
I was cleaning out my office closet this morning and found a copy of Marketing Sherpa‘s Email Marketing Metrics Guide for 2005. Among the many dozens of charts in there was one that measured 2004 email open rates by industry. I thought it would be interesting to compare those rates with more current rates, and found this post from MarketingProfs that provides 2010 open rates.
One of the problems with comparing open rates then and now is that industry sectors aren’t exactly the same. Still, looking at the now-numbers above and the then-numbers below is interesting, if nothing else:
Manufacturing: 46%
Finance & Insurance: 44%
Professional Services & Consulting: 40%
Technology: 40%
Healthcare and Social Assistance: 32%
Marketing: 43%
The same problem exists with that more valuable metric, click rates: The industry sectors aren’t exactly the same, not even from page to page within the Sherpa report. Still, it’s an interesting journey down memory lane:
Business Products & Services: 6.7%
Consumer Products: 9.5%
Consumer Services: 9.3%
Financial Services: 11.8%
Travel: 8.3%
Retail & Catalog: 7.1%
Business Publisher: 7.3%
Consumer Publisher: 9.6%
All in all, I think it add up to one more piece of evidence (as if any more were needed) about how much more competitive email marketing has become over the past half-decade.