Last year we discussed the results of the UK email marketing benchmark report published by Sign-Up.to, showing that the Government sector was leading the way in open and click through rates for email campaigns. The same benchmarking report has been published for 2011 and not much has changed.
The Government sector is currently ahead of the other 22 industry sectors surveyed with an open rate of 34.06% which is lower than last year’s 35.6% but their click through rates have risen slighly from 9.08% in 2010 to 9.23% in 2011. Engagement levels are measured by click to open rates where Government is in second place (27.11%) with a significant increase from last year’s 25.51%. This could be because their emails continue to send out interesting, informative content or due to a general increase in public interest in what the Government is doing. Industrial/Manufacturing is roughly in the middle and Property relatively near the bottom, both experiencing a decrease in engagement levels when compared to last year and are also below the overall average. Why is this the case? Are the calls to action not strong enough to get people to click through to landing pages? Is the content not interesting enough? Is email not the right channel for the messages promoted? How does the shift in mobile usage impact the results?
Unsubscription rates remain low across all sectors showing that the email content being sent out is still relevant and valuable to recipients. Industrial/Manufacturing is the only one with a higher than average rate which could be due to the fact that some of their email content is not relevant or could be a bit self-promotional especially if they are based around new products/technologies.
Below is a table summarising the figures for the Government, Industrial/Manufacturing and Property sectors compared to the overall average results for all 23 sectors surveyed.
With the rise of social media many people predicted that email marketing campaigns would be significantly less effective but these results clearly show that this is not the case. Email is here to stay and remains an effective vehicle for various industry sectors to send out relevant messages and communicate with their audiences. To increase the spread of your email include social sharing icons so that people can share it with their peers on networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
You can read and download the full report here.
