Email volumes rose by around a third from the beginning to the end of Q4, probably due to seasonal trends, with many companies making 50 percent of their annual revenue within this period. Unsurprisingly considering the time period, the retail sector was the largest broadcaster of business to consumer emails for almost a third of ESPs surveyed, allowing them to drive on and offline sales and quantify precisely the return on investment from email campaigns.

FMCG, media and travel and leisure also showed impressive use of B2C email marketing in this quarter, while the largest sector for B2B emails was media publishing, a change from Q3 where the IT sector registered the highest volumes.

Richard Gibson, Chairman of the Email Marketing Council’s Benchmarking Hub commented, “Quarter 4 of any year is a busy time for email marketers and this is reflected in the results of this survey. What is however, interesting and unlikely to be seasonal is the improvement in the rate of soft bounces which is at its lowest level since this survey was first conducted and which is hopefully due to an improvement in list hygiene and data cleansing.”

All UK ESPs surveyed now track delivery on behalf of their clients and with a median non-delivery rate of less than 4% it appears that ESPs now have this issue broadly under control. However, a third of ESPs still said their clients weren’t tracking conversion rates - a situation which needs to improve in order to show the true ROI generated by email marketing.

The number of clients that are now requesting a “hybrid” service from suppliers has also grown, with most ESPs undertaking a combination of both acquisition and retention broadcasting. This has been an upward trend over the last three reports and will continue to be monitored in the reports the DMA are in the process of collating for 2005.

In Q4 the ESPs surveyed were likely to be operating solely in the B2C sector or across both the B2B and B2C markets with no ESPs claiming to be working solely in the B2B arena. The volume of B2B emails being sent did however, increase in Q4.

The National Email Benchmarking Survey was conducted by independent benchmarking specialists tank! Copies of the Report are free to members at www.dma.org.uk/research. Non-members can view the Executive Summary of the report at this address or purchase the full report at a cost of £195 + VAT by emailing daniell@dma.org.uk.

For further information please contact:
Liz Bastone
DMA PR Manager
Tel : 020 7291 3315
Email : liz@dma.org.uk