E-mails are so inexpensive to send that most marketers are pushed to mail more than they should.  We are seeing rates of e-mails sent to each subscriber per month go up and up, month after month. When they go up, what happens?  To get the answer, I studied 181 company e-mails to check their monthly e-mails delivered per subscriber with their open and click rates. The answers were not dramatic. But they did show a general trend.  In general, the more you mail, the lower your subscriber open and click rate. Here are the open results:

There are always exceptions, of course, but the trend is quite visible. The more e-mails that your subscribers receive per month, the lower their HTML open rate.  The only exceptions are e-mailers who send less than one e-mail per month.  Their low open rates could be because the subscribers had forgotten about them due to the low frequency.

It is important to recognize that none of these e-mailers had open rates of over 20%. This means that 80% or more of their e-mails were never opened. The average open rate of all these 181 companies was 14.1% opens – meaning that 85% were never opened.

Actually, the open rates were even lower than this chart appears to indicate.  Because many subscribers use a reading pane, many of these opens are not really opened at all. As the subscriber moves down her e-mail inbox with her mouse, a portion of each e-mail shows up in a reading pane to the right of her screen.

As you can see, the start of an article from the Wall Street Journal is visible.  When this happens, a packet is sent back to the Wall Street Journal that says in effect, “Arthur Hughes has just opened the e-mail that we sent to him.”  Actually, I just moved down my inbox. I really did not open this e-mail at all. I went on to the next e-mail on my list. It counts as an open, however.  So we have to discount these open rates by a significant percentage. No one knows how much.

The real test of an open is the click rate.  When an e-mail is actually opened, the subscriber starts reading it. As he reads, it he may click with his mouse on something interesting.  That is a real open. In the case of the Wall Street Journal article, there is a link for the article about Apple.  Here is what happened when I click on this link:

This page showed up because when I clicked on the link for the article, a packet went to WSJ saying “Arthur Hughes wants to see the article about the Apple iPhone”. WSJ sent me the article so I could read it. That is a real open.

How many e-mails are clicked on? This is another convoluted story. We looked at a similar large number of companies to track their unique clicks as a percentage of their opens. Here are the results:

These numbers are fairly consistent. Between 15% and 25% of opened e-mails are clicked on.  If we can count a click as a real open, then the number of real opens is 22.52% of 14.1% or 3.175%. That is the average number of truly opened e-mails.  This means, of course, that more than 96% of all e-mails, on average, are not opened.

Comparing this 3.175% opened with the average number of conversions provides a really interesting story. I have conversion rates on only about 83 companies.  Here are the results:

This chart tells us that the 0.12% of the average delivered e-mail produced a sale.  These same e-mails have an open (clicked on) rate of 3.175%. Putting these two numbers together, on the average, 3.78% of clicked on e-mails produce a sale.  That is a terrific number.  It means that e-mailers should concentrate not on mailing so many, but on getting their e-mails opened and clicked on more.

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Arthur Middleton Hughes is VP of The Database Marketing Institute. (www.dbmarketing.com) His new book from McGraw-Hill, Strategic Database Marketing 4^th Edition will be published later this year. He can be reached at Arthur.hughes@dbmarketing.com.

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