E-mail Open Rates Peak on Friday

"The day descent has been a moving target every quarter," said Ryan Buchanan, president and CEO of eROI. "What we are seeing in this trend is that business-to-consumer emails…performed better on Friday."

E-mail volume may have some correlation to open and click rates. Excluding the weekends, fewer emails were sent on Friday than any other day of the week. The highest volume fell on Monday, with 23.3 million messages. On Friday, the firm’s clients sent an average 16.3 million.

Targeted messages see better results. Micro-mailers, or lists with under 5,000 recipients, enjoy open rates of at least 40 percent; and click rates between seven percent and 11 percent. Buchanan recommends formulating more targeted lists for campaigns during the traditional planning month of January.

"As marketers plan out their 2006 email campaigns, we should think about segmenting our lists," said Buchanan. "As marketers, we hopefully have more than just an email address on the customer list. If we have an idea of what our customers are interested in, we should use that information. E-mail campaigns are statistically proven to perform better if they’re getting more relevant resource information based on their interests and preferences."

The Q4 E-mail Statistics report is the sixth quarterly report published by eROI. Data are taken from email campaigns sent by the company throughout the course of the quarter.