Striata publishes e-marketing benchmarks

While there is a large body of international research and statistics on e-mail marketing, similar information for the local environment is hard to find. This prompted electronic messaging and marketing specialist Striata to look internally for the development of local e-marketing benchmarks.

Mia Papanicolaou, head of e-marketing at Striata, says Striata sends, tracks and analyses an average of 4.5 million marketing-based e-mails a month. "We used this incredible volume of information to produce what we consider to be representative benchmarks for e-mail marketing in the South African market."

The benchmarks presented by Striata are indicative of how effective electronic marketing is in the local market, and according to Papanicolaou, can be used by marketers to compare their own results.

"The real power of electronic marketing is in its measurability. Having information about your customers' activity and being able to compare these results to an industry benchmark, is invaluable to marketers."

In the business-to-business environment, the average e-mail delivery success rate is 87%. This means that on average 13% of B2B e-mails failed to deliver.

Of the e-mails that were successfully delivered, the total views of that e-mail (some recipients may open it two, three or more times) is 25%. Counting each recipient that opens the e-mail once provides a 'unique views' figure of 15%.

The measurement used to track the level of activity prompted by an e-mail is the click-through rate (CTR). This is a count of who clicked on which links in an e-mail. On average, 5% of those that received the e-mail clicked on a link. When calculated as a percentage of the people that opened the e-mail, 25% clicked on a link.

The business-to-consumer e-mail delivery success rate is lower at 81%, with 19% of e-mails failing to deliver.

The open rate is, however, better in the B2C environment, with unique views at 17% of successful deliveries.

The CTR compared to delivered e-mails is better at 11% of delivered e-mails, while compared to opened e-mails it is 39%.

Papanicolaou cautions that the open rate statistics are just a guide, as technology can only track an individual when they view the e-mail in HTML format while online.

"There is room for improvement in both the B2B and B2C arenas," says Papanicolaou.

To improve delivery rates, ongoing database management is critical in both B2B and B2C environments. However, the latter is usually more problematic as consumers tend to change e-mail addresses or use free e-mail accounts and fail to clear their mailboxes.

"CTR improvements can be achieved by focusing on the e-mail layout, ensuring that it is clean and visually attractive yet simple, easy to read and with relevant content," says Papanicolaou.

"Improving the unique view rate requires a catchy subject line and close attention to consumer response patterns. For example, analysis reveals that the best days for reading e-mail are Tuesday to Thursday, while the worst is Monday. Click responses are best on Tuesdays and Thursdays while Friday is poor."

E-mail is a cost-effective way of communicating but needs considerable planning. Papanicolaou says design must cater for the lowest common denominator and 'preview pane' locality preferences, wording must be carefully selected and the overall presentation must demonstrate relevance in order to obtain a response or initiate a click-through action.