Email Click Rates Decline Y-O-Y, Again, in Q1 2017

July 26, 2017

This article is included in these additional categories:

Demographics & Audiences | Digital | Email | Financial Services | Industries | North America | Pharma & Healthcare

Email click rates in North America have failed to increase on a year-over-year basis for the 16th consecutive quarter, per Epsilon’s latest quarterly review [download page] of client activity. The Q1 2017 report shows the average click-through rate at 3.2%, down from 3.4% a year earlier.

Open and click rates continued to diverge in Q1: once again, open rates registered a year-over-year increase even as click rates dropped. The average open rate for emails sent by Epsilon’s North American clients was 33.5%.

Marketing Emails Have Lowest Click-Through Rate

Some 92.9% of emails sent by Epsilon clients during Q1 were classified as marketing messages, meaning that they contained merchandise information and incentives for purchasing.

These emails performed far worse than others, registering a 23.1% open rate (vs. the 33.5% average) and a 1.5% click rate (vs. the 3.5 average).

Some industries fared better than others with their marketing emails, though. The “Financial services cc/banks” sector, for example, achieved almost a 50% (49.9%) open rate for the quarter. The “Consumer products pharmaceutical” industry, by comparison, managed only a 13.4% open rate on its marketing emails. However, the industry made up for it with the highest click-to-open rate, of 13.1%.

Triggered Emails Show Similar Patterns

Triggered emails continued to show far greater response rates than business-as-usual (BAU) emails, averaging a 56.7% open rate and an 8.6% click rate.

Yet, triggered emails followed generally the same pattern as BAU emails, as open rates rose on a year-over-year basis even as click rates declined.

Interestingly, only 2.7% of emails sent during Q1 were triggered messages, just half the share from the prior quarter (5.4%). That may be due to more transactions occurring during the holiday period, which in turn led to more “Thank You” and “Confirmation” emails, among others.

In a reversal from BAU emails, it was the “Consumer products pharmaceutical” sector with the highest click rate on triggered emails, with an average of 16%. As with BAU emails, though, the “Financial services cc/banks” industry enjoyed the highest open rate on triggered emails, of 70.1%.

About the Data: The results are based on an analysis of 9.9 billion emails sent during Q1 (January through March) 2017 across multiple industries and approximately 150 clients.

Chart-Library-Ad-1

Explore More Articles.

Which Skills Are Important in RevOps?

Which Skills Are Important in RevOps?

9 in 10 RevOps professionals view data analysis skills as being important, a high percentage also don’t believe they need this skill for their job.

Marketing Charts Logo

Stay on the cutting edge of marketing.

Sign up for our free newsletter.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This