DMA launches findings from its second National Benchmarking Survey

Conducted by independent benchmarking specialists tank!, this research has been developed to enable the Email Marketing Council to analyse industry trends and help email marketers in their day to day business activities. This is the second in a series of Benchmarking Reports from the Council and was conducted in quarter three of 2004.

The findings from this research do not mark a huge departure from those of quarter two, however there is a noticeable increase in average unique click through rates for both B2C and B2B retention email activity as well as an increase in the volume of emails being sent. The total number of emails sent has increased by 29% from the Q2 results and the greatest improvement in overall response rates can be seen in B2C retention activity, potentially due to better segmentation and targeting.

Richard Gibson, Chair of the Email Marketing Council's Benchmarking Hub commented, "One of the biggest issues raised in this survey was the detrimental effect spam and netcrime are having on email marketing. While many positive findings can be taken from this report, with 100% of respondents claiming spam was negatively impacting on email marketing and 15% reporting an occurrence of netcrime in Q3, there is clearly an urgent need to address two areas which are the biggest threat to consumer confidence to email marketers and hampering the reputation of the dm industry."

Another of the key issues highlighted from the findings of the Q2 report was that of deliverability. While the feedback from the Q3 survey suggests that deliverability has generally remained fairly static, encouragement can be taken from the fact that there appears to have been some dramatic improvements in 'soft bounce rates' (decreasing from 4.32% to 1.77%) and ISP filtering (reducing from 5.27% to 1.43%). These improvements could be linked to better ISP relations, better list hygiene and better targeting. It will be interesting to see whether these figures continue to improve over the forthcoming quarters.

When comparing the results of the Q2 survey to Q3, of concern is the proportion of companies that are still not tracking conversion rates. This is an area that certainly needs to be addressed if we are able to understand the true return on investment provided by email marketing and is an issue the Email Marketing Council will be addressing over the coming months.

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