E-mail marketing must be carefully planned. We now know that consumers prefer to respond to offers from publishers at weekends but to offers from other marketers between Tuesday and Thursday, thanks to a report published by internet advertising service DoubleClick.
The company's Email Marketing Trend Report, which is released on a quarterly basis, indicates that e-mails from catalogue operators and retailers have the highest 'click-through' rates compared to other industries. In addition, the data provides early indications that the best day to receive high click-through rates on e-mail offers differs significantly for publishers and other marketers. A click-through is defined as a recipient clicking on a link to the advertiser's web site within the e-mail message.
Clicking on links
The report, which uses data gathered by the company's DARTmail system, reveals that within the overall marketing segment, catalogue operators had the highest e-mail click-through rate at 9.5%, and the retail segment is close behind it with 9.1%, compared to the hospitality segment with only 4.4%. These figures indicate that catalogue operators and retailers are successfully integrating e-mail into their marketing efforts, effectively adding e-mail to their list of customer relationship communication channels.
Passing it along
In addition, 'pass along' rates were high for both the catalogue segment (0.4%), and for the retail segment (0.6%), compared to the business-to-business (B2B) segment (0.2%), implying that consumers are spreading retail and catalogue e-mail messages to others. A pass along is defined as a recipient forwarding the advertiser's e-mail to someone else, who then clicks on the link contained within the original e-mail.
The following results summary shows the leading segments in both click-throughs and pass-alongs: