2012 Association Email Marketing Report
Emails promoting events have the best open rates for associations and most people are still opening their emails by their desktop computers.
These are among the findings of the Informz 2012 Association Email Marketing Report, released this month. Informz analyzed the results from 600 million emails sent by more than 700 large and mid-sized associations.
The purpose of the study is to provide industry-specific metrics to association email marketers, enabling them to have a better understanding of
- what metrics to analyze when reviewing email marketing programs
- what goals to set based on similar organizations, and
- how their email marketing programs are performing.
The analysis shows that in 2011, 57 percent of email recipients opened their email using desktop software, down from 61 percent in 2010 and 67 percent in 2009, when Informz began tracking association email marketing. Those who use desktop to open emails still dominate opens, however, with only 19 percent using web-based email; 17 percent used a mobile device and 7 percent were uncertain how they open their emails.
Emails promoting events had the best open rate at 39.37 percent, with a click rate of 17.25 percent. One possibility for the disparity between the two rates is that people receive event notifications but do not immediately take action to register for the event. This signifies the importance of sending multiple emails during a campaign to promote an event, Informz advises.
Emails for surveys garnered an open rate of 36.6 percent, with a click rate of 33.39%, better than for events. Newsletter emails had an open rate of 27.64 percent and a click rate of 22.11 percent. Emails for appeals had the lowest open rate, 31.44 percent, with a click rate of just 14.63 percent.
Keep those subject lines short!
Informz found that subject lines with less than 10 characters had the best open rate, 58 percent, followed by subject lines that had 50 to 59 characters, 42 percent.
“If your subject line is too long (more than 50 characters on a PC or more than 30 characters on mobile) it will be truncated and could deliver a different meaning than you intended....In the end, take time to consider your subject line and be mindful of the length.
You got mail – in the morning
While not a strong figure, Informz found that mail sent in the morning hours had a slightly better open rate than the rest of the day, 39.2 percent, but clicks had the worst rate in the morning, just 16.5 percent. The rest of the day – mid-day, late afternoon and night – had nearly the same open rates, about 33 percent, and click rates, about 19 percent.
Other findings
- The average email metrics for associations include a 98.28 percent delivery rate, 34.33 percent open rate, 19.49 percent click rate and a .052 percent unsubscribe rate.
- As with the 2011 results, this year’s study found that the day of the week sent had little effect on the open and click results.
- In this study, iPhone was the leader in the mobile device category at 12 percent, while iPad reported at 4 percent and Android at 3 percent.
- 49 percent of emails sent were read by recipients (opened for longer than 10 seconds) while 35 percent of emails were opened for less than three seconds.
The entire report is available at the Informz website, www.informz.com.
