Email Marketing Benchmarks for Associations from Informz

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:37:00 GMT

Email service provider Informz has released results of their 2012 Association Email Marketing Benchmark Report and it's definitely worth a look.

What may surprise Internet marketers is that the day of the week had little effect on open and click rates, and that while mobile email usage is on the rise, desktop emails results in better performance.

It is important to note that the Informz report collected data from over 700 large and mid-sized "associations" using its platform, which sent over 600 million emails in 2011 consisting of newsletters, appeals, surveys, and event-related emails. While not a purely commerce-driven, the data does reveal some interesting insights. The most notable in my opinion is that as with Informz' 2011 results, this year’s study found that the day of the week sent had little effect on the open and click results.

A few additional finding from the report include:

- The average email metrics for associations include a 98.28% delivery rate, 34.33% open rate, 19.49% click rate and a 0.052% unsubscribe rate.

- Emails sent in the morning resulted in the highest open rates at 39.2%, while mid-afternoon reported the highest click rates at 21.0%.

- Shorter subject lines continued to outperform their longer counterparts. Fewer than 10 characters achieved the best open rate at 58%.

- 49% of emails sent were read by recipients (opened for longer than 10 seconds) while 35% of emails were opened for less than 3 seconds.

- Survey-related emails had the highest combined open and click rates with 36.60% average opens and 33.39% clicks.

- Appeal-related emails had the lowest click rate of the emails studied at 14.63%

“The results from this year’s report support the idea that the relevancy of an email’s content has a greater impact on email results than factors like email timing," said Joe Tyler, CEO of Informz. "This type of information can aide associations in creating email programs that deliver better results.”

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Email Marketing Benchmarks for Associations from Informz