A new report from Epsilon shows average email open rate increasing in North America to 31.1% in Q4 2012. This was a remarkable increase from Q4 of 2012, where average open rates were just 27.4% and 26.2% in the beginning of 2012.
The report shows a steady growth from 2010 for email marketing performance, which Epsilon believes is an indicator that email marketers are increasingly optimizing email campaigns leading to an increase in performance and open rates.
The study also shows that trigger emails (post registration or Abandoned Shopping Cart emails for eCommerce) largely out performance standard newsletters or "business as usual" emails. Open rates for trigger emails climbed to an average of exactly 50% in Q1 2013.
The increase in tools and technologies for digital marketers--from marketing automation tools to improved email marketing cloud tools can help drive optimization of campaigns leading to an increase in performance. Another factor helping to drive better performance for newsletter and business email open rates could also be improvements to spam filters and auto-labeling spam, which reduces to exhaustion on email inboxes and reduction of clutter. Optimization is critical to digital marketing and email performance. Web design tactics should also not be ignored as part of the equation... Improvements to landing pages within targeted campaigns should be managed hand-in-hand with email optimization to drive performance increases across the whole campaign.
