Trends Report Has Been Revised!

We launched the "Email Marketing Trends Report" last week and with it came a lot of questions. We realized that we did one thing wrong, broke our data down too much to where it may have seemed confusing and may not have told any real stories. So we decided to go back and simplify things a bit. We collapsed the list segments so you can now have a better understanding of where you fall, look at the report with confidence and gather intelligent info from it. Bob Kot, I hope I answered your comment about clicks below.

Some things to note:

• Across the board it appears that the normal trend for click and open rates decrease as a list grows large. It may be because many smaller businesses tend to have closer relationships with their recipients so the open/click rates are trending higher and in some cases 30% higher. Some list segments had unusually higher click rates only because their campaigns were *very* successful. Some of these campaign examples were surveys with incentives that got forwarded multiple times which affected the click rates positively, others were very targeted with great information.

• In all but 5 industries the bounce rate tends to go down as a list grows. In these 5 industries the rate increases with a list sizes over 20,000. This could mean that some businesses in those industries have data input issues or may not email their list as frequently. In general all industry bounce rates for each list size seem close.

• In 16 out of 30 industries unsubscribe rates increase with the larger list sizes. This could mean that as lists grow to a certain size and businesses become less familiar with recipients and they may tend to unsubscribe over time. It also might mean that businesses are not targeting their campaigns enough to keep their recipients interested.  Another reason might be that some of the businesses with these lists collecting data may not be using "confirmed opt-in" methods. This would bring this rate down quite a bit. An increase in attrition on larger list sizes is expected.

The main point here is that you should look at your rates and check them against this "average" range.  If you're above it? Great news! Love to hear your comments.