Just read a very interesting report from MailerMailer about email marketing metrics. The report is well worth a read, and I’ve summarised what I’ve learned below.

Open rates have been in decline for a while now, and and are currently just under 14%. Open rates aren’t a good or accurate indicator of campaign success for many reasons, and are becoming less so as people read their email from handheld devices. Open rates were highest for emails from banking/financial companies, travel agencies and telcos.

As we’ve said on numerous occasions, click-through rates are a much better indicator of a campaign’s effectiveness. MailerMailer report click-through rates of 2.9% for the last half of 2007, down from 3.2% for the first half of the year.

As discussed in other blog posts here, you can increase your click-through rate by having a call to action (’Buy Now’ or ‘Click here’), a deadline for response, and a well-designed email that provides useful information or content.

Interestingly, they also found that subject lines with less than 35 characters had a much higher click-through rate than longer subject lines. As we’ve also mentioned in the past, it’s a good idea to test different key concepts in your subject lines and monitoring click-through rates, to see which words and phrases your audience will more readily respond to.

This report is well worth a read for anyone who’s interested in getting more out of email marketing.