Harte-Hanks and its email subsidiary Postfuture compared the aggregate email metrics of 4,300 business and consumer email campaigns — both marketing and transaction emails.

The report allows marketers to see which vertical markets are doing the best to pique the interest of email recipients. Certainly these data could be helpful to measure your email marketing performance.

For example, the average delivery rate was 91.2%; open rate was 78.8%, click-through rate 18.4 and opt-out rate of 0.4% of all email delivered.

Of the 13 industry categories, restaurants enjoyed the best open rates at 167.7% and click-through rates at 57.5. On the other end of the rope were the retail industry with open rates of 35.3% and automative sector with the lowest click-through rates at 5.7%.

A more than 100% open rates could be achieved because the mailing was forwarded and passed along.

Postfuture also found that email sent to consumers did the best (open rates and click-through rates of 78.9% and 19.9%, respectively) while business-to-business email had the numbers at 67.7% and 11.2%.

Probably the most exciting number is the fact that behavioral targeting raised metrics significantly.

“One large retailer achieved a 74.2% open rate, 24.1% click-through rate and 0.1% opt-out rate, just by synchronizing e-mail with in-store activity,” said Merrick. “Using transactional e-mail to make dynamic product recommendations produce, on average, a 148.8% open rate and a 20.4% click-through rate.”

It is actually exciting to see that marketers could find its way to improve targeting and response to email marketing. The future of email could just be brighther although the cost of acquisition and lead generation are expected to rise too.

Source: eMarketer.