Silverpop, recently announces the findings of its 2014 Email Marketing Benchmarks Study, which revealed that timely and automated personalized marketing messages were far more successful for businesses in engaging customers than emails generated manually by marketers without consideration of recent recipient actions.
The report studied emails sent by nearly 3,000 brands across 40 countries throughout 2013. Silverpop examined traditional customer engagement benchmarks and, for the first time, compared the performance of transactional versus non-transactional messages and automated versus manual messages. The study found that automated messages achieved an open rate nearly 15 percent higher and click-through rate nearly 79 percent higher than their manual counterparts, on average (median), indicating today’s buyers are most likely to engage with individualized messages delivered when it’s most relevant to them.
Among the notable findings were:
- Transactional messages (emails triggered automatically by behaviors like purchases or account activity) sent by companies with results in the top-quartile have open rates four times higher than median open rates for non-transactional messages
- Transactional messages also achieved a median click-through rate of 4.2 percent and click-to-open rate of 15.1 percent, compared to nontransactional messages at 1.5 and 9.9 percent, respectively
- The overall median hard-bounce rate was just under 0.04 percent, indicating email marketers made list hygiene a top priority in 2013
- Top quartile performers’ automated messages achieved click-through rates nearly 60 percent higher than manual sends and open rates more than double the median and five to 22 times higher than bottom-quartile performers
Nely Bonar
06/13/2014
