E-mail click-through rates rise 27.5% for merchants, DoubleClick says

Despite increased levels of spam and efforts to block it, delivery rates and click-through rates are rising for legitimate e-mail sent by merchants, DoubleClick Inc. reports in its Q3 E-mail Trend Report. For the third quarter, merchants’ e-mail delivery rates rose 2.8%, to 90.6%, while click-through rates rose 27.5%, to 8.8%, DoubleClick said.

By comparison, the overall Q3 e-mail delivery rate, including e-mail sent by consumer products and services companies, travel companies and business publishers, rose 1.7% year-over-year to 88.2%. The Q3 overall click-through rate rose 8.2%, to 9.2% from 8.5% a year ago.

In addition, merchants’ revenue per delivered e-mail message in Q3 rose 24% to $0.26, up from $0.21 a year ago, DoubleClick said. It also noted that the average order size rose 4% to $101, up from $97 a year ago.

DoubleClick’s Email Trend Report is based on about 2 billion permission-based e-mail messages sent by hundreds of clients of DoubleClick’s DARTmail e-mail delivery technology.