Marketing services firm DoubleClick in its trend survey for the last quarter of 2003 says that European clickthrough rates rose 15% between the third and fourth quarters.
This means that clic through rates for the last quarter in Europe stood at 11.3% compared with just 8.4% for the same period in the US.
In terms of clickthrough rates by message type the survey, which is based on more than 2bn permission-based emails, found that HTML leads the way.
For the last quarter of 2003 HTML emails reached a 12.7% clickthrough rate compared with 4.8% for text emails. In the US figures for the same period are 11.4% and 4.6% respectively.
The number of those opening emails also increased between the third and last quarters in Europe, up 1.8% to 42.9%. France's open rates reached 55.3% during the period, compared with 43.2% in the UK, 37.3% in Germany and 36.8% in the US.
Ben Regensburger, DoubleClick EMEA vice-president of sales and account management, said: "The trend data shows that email marketing is getting more effective as clickthrough rates are increasing."
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