E-mail open rates are down, but conversion rates are up: Those are the first-quarter trends reported by New York-based marketing services provider DoubleClick.
The adoption of image-blocking filtering mechanisms used by many ISPs and e-mail programs reduced open rates from 38.2% in the first quarter of last year to 30.2% in the first quarter of 2005. Fortunately, click rates declined less dramatically, from 8.4% to 7.9%. For marketers, this demonstrates that content has remained effective in driving click response once an e-mail has been opened.
In fact, click-to-purchase conversion rates for DoubleClick’s retail and catalog customers rose 24% between the first quarter of 2004 and that of this year, from 3.3% to 4.1%. And orders per e-mail delivered rose 18% during the same time period, from 0.22% to 0.26%.