As you probably remember, last month we asked you to take our
Email Marketers' Survey.

1,711 email marketing professionals immediately complied, sharing
their plans and results data. (Thank you!) Here is a quick useful
summary of what we learned:

-> Open and click through rate trends

Despite widely prevailing fears that the spam influx combined
with increased email filtering will hurt marketer's open rates,
in reality this doesn't seem to be the case for house lists (i.e.
marketers' own opt-in lists).

Among marketers mailing to house lists (opt-in lists they
gathered themselves), 68.4% report their open rates have changed
little or not at all during the past year. In fact 22.4% said
their open rates have increased since mid-2001! Less than 10%
said open rates have dropped.

However, 36% of marketers reported that open rates for third party
lists have declined compared to just 9% for house lists. 37% of
marketers said rental lists were also declining in clicks.

-> Gathering opt-in email names for house lists

Also despite prevailing fears, just 6.4% of marketers who measure
the success of their opt-in offers reported that consumers are
significantly less willing to join lists these days.

In fact 31% reported their success at gathering opt-ins has
significantly increased in the past year.

Part of this success comes from the fact that more marketers
(54.6%) are placing opt-in forms directly on their home pages,
instead of (44%) asking visitors to click through a link to sign
up. The easier you make it, the more opt-ins you will gather.

Despite heavy promotions from the append industry, email
marketers are not biting. Just 4.8% of marketers surveyed used
append to gather emails. However, almost 15% were investing in
telemarketing for the same purpose.

The majority (52.7%) of marketers use single opt-in to gather
names. Privacy advocates would be disappointed to learn more far
marketers are using with opt-out (36.9%), which is regarded by
many as a "worst practice," than those using double opt-in
(23.9%), which is regarded as a "best practice." Notably,
respondents using double opt-in reported significantly higher
open rates than other marketers.


-> B2B versus B2C

B2B marketers diverged from business-to-consumer
marketers in almost every metric, which proves that speaking of
email marketing in a general overarching way does not make sense
anymore.

For example, B2B marketers report much higher open rates for
their email campaigns, more than 2/3 (64%) get about 50% opens
for house mailings versus less than half (47%) of B2C marketers.

Also, B2B marketers reported much higher average click through
rates to house lists. 27% of B2B marketers compared to 20% of
B2C marketers claimed average clicks of 30% or higher.


-> Marketers' plans for the rest of 2002

The good news is that very, very few marketers intend to reduce
email marketing spending during the rest of the year. Only 1-5%
planned to pull back.

However, most expenditures are scheduled for house lists. 54% of
marketers plan to increase their email newsletters (either by
increasing frequency or launching new newsletters), and 51% plan
to increase sending "alerts" to their own list.

Just 30% plan to spend more renting lists, and 29% plan to spend
more sponsoring third party email newsletters. That is still
significant growth for the email advertising industry though, if
marketers put their money where their mouth is!