Q2 2012 North America Email Trend Results: Significant Opportunity to Better Engage New Subscribers

Epsilon and the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Email Experience Council released the Q2 2012 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks report, which introduces a new metric, Email Activity Segment Evaluation (EASE). According to EASE, 59 percent of new email subscribers on an average email list are unengaged with email marketing programs.

"Marketers today are asked to do more with less. Based on our discussions with clients and fellow marketers, we decided to introduce the Email Activity Segment Evaluation to help marketers find additional value in their existing assets: their email subscriber lists," said Judy Loschen, vice president of digital analytics at Epsilon. "Understanding each customer's state of engagement as well as their behavior over time enables effective and highly relevant one-to-one communications. These insights can help marketers create greater impact with both triggered and business as usual messages."

Business As Usual (BAU) Email Trends
The quarterly analysis is compiled from 7.3 billion emails sent by Epsilon in April, May and June 2012, across multiple industries and approximately 170 participating clients. The analysis combines data from Epsilon's proprietary platforms.

BAU Highlights:

• Non-Bounce rate remained strong at 95.9% percent
• Open rates decreased slightly quarter over quarter (-2.5 percent), but increased over Q2 2011 (15.2 percent), resulting in an overall open rate of 25.6 percent.
• Click rates decreased 0.3 percentage points from last quarter to 4.4 percent. They are also lower than Q211 (5.2 percent), but remain stable over the last two years.

Triggered Messages Email Trends
Triggered message benchmarks are compiled from over 193 million triggered emails sent by Epsilon from April to June 2012 across multiple industries. Results track campaigns deployed as a result of an action or trigger such as Welcome, Abandon Shopping Cart, Thank You and Anniversary.

Triggered Highlights:

• Triggered open rates were 94.8 percent higher than BAU. This is an increase over the previous quarter (75 percent) and the previous year (82.1 percent).
• Triggered messages accounted for 2.6 percent of total volume, 22.0 percent higher than Q211 (2.1 percent) and 14 percent higher than Q112 (2.3 percent).
• Triggered click rates continued to perform well, reporting 122.1 percent higher than BAU. Q211 triggered click rates showed an 88.6 percent lift over BAU.

Email Activity Segment Evaluation (EASE)
These metrics are compiled from over 660 million non-bounced and opted-in email addressed that were contracted from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012, across multiple industries and approximately 150 clients. The EASE analysis, which includes behavioral segments, examined the overall performance of the average email file.