A few new pieces of information regarding e-mail marketing were released in the last day or two.
One hot topic in e-mail marketing recently has been the best day of the week to send e-mail communications to customers. A recent report suggests that there is no longer a favorable day to send e-mail, which is a change from the last report. Of course, Saturday and Sunday are still not popular days to send commercial e-mail for obvious reasons.
DoubleClick released some figures yesterday that suggest a rising trend in orders per e-mail. During the fourth quarter of 2004, orders per email delivered were 0.35 percent, contrasted with 0.30 percent in 2003. I’ve typically seen that 0.5 percent of e-mails delivered generate orders.
Finally, a presentation at the Annual Catalog Conference in Florida yesterday revealed that large ISP’s that filter out images from e-mail messages are having a negative impact on commercial e-mail marketing. As you may know, HTML e-mail generally generates higher conversion rates than plain text messages, but e-mail clients such as Gmail and Hotmail do not display images in e-mail without the viewer’s permission. When you send an e-mail communication, it is probably best to include a message to your subscribers asking them to “display images.”
