Studies: Germans Say 'Ja' to E-mail, Holiday Deliverability Tanks On Record Volume
Germans are more likely to open and click on e-mails than recipients in the U.S. and U.K.
A new Silverpop study released this morning that compared e-mail marketing in the U.S., U.K., and Germany found campaigns sent to the latter country received the highest open rate of 24.9 percent. That number is 3 points higher than e-mails sent to Americans and 2 points greater than ones sent to the U.K.
E-mail sent to Germany had a 5 percent click-through rate, which bested the U.K. (4.8 percent) and U.S. (4.5 percent). Germans appear to be turned off less by the medium than their counterparts, registering the lowest complaint rate at .01 percent compared to .05 for the U.K. and .12 percent for the U.S. Differing practices, such as use of complaint feedback loops, between U.S.-based ISPs and those in other countries factors into the higher spam-complaint rate in American campaigns, according to the report.
To uncover these findings, Silverpop pulled a random sample set of 7,000 e-mail messages, delivered to a minimum of 50 recipients in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. An intriguing data-point examined in the Atlanta-based ESP’s report: “opens per opener,” which measures how many times a recipient opens an e-mail. Germany also led that statistic, averaging 1.68 times compared to 1.65 for the U.S. and 1.57 for the U.K.
Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, e-mail marketing messages were increasingly blocked in the weeks leading up to Christmas as advertisers pelted inboxes with “last-minute shipping” offers. A study released today by Pivotal Veracity revealed that ISP spam filters blocked a daily average of 11.26 percent of messages from Dec. 13 to 19.
The Phoenix-based ESP found that the worst day to get e-mail delivered was Dec. 17, when 13.8 percent of messages were blocked and only 78.8 percent were routed to recipient inboxes. The data was from thousands of unique campaigns tracked last month by Pivotal Veracity via “seed accounts.”
Just over 12 percent of those campaigns were blocked on December 22. That number dropped significantly the next day to 6.4 percent, but the filtering lifted again during the final days of 2009 as retailers e-mailed post-holiday offers. Dec. 28 and 30 saw block rates of 11.8 percent, 13.3 percent, and 11.5 percent, respectively, according to Pivotal Veracity.
Coincidentally, a RetailEmailBlog.com study set to post tomorrow shows that December 2009 was the busiest month on record for retail e-mail marketers since the blog first started reporting on the category three years ago. Retailers averaged 15.4 e-mails to individual subscribers during the month, up from 14.6 in 2008. Volume the week prior to Christmas Day was 5 percent greater compared to the same week 2008.
