According to the National Email Benchmarking Survey Q1鈥換3 2005, most ESPs are achieving delivery rates in the 86%-95% band, but there are still 15% of ESPs who do not know their delivery rates.
A very small minority of ESPs believed that all their clients are able to estimate the monetary loss resulting from non-delivery of their marketing emails.
The survey has been brought more up to date with the release of data for the first three quarters of 2005. In the third quarter, the ESPs surveyed sent, in total, almost 800m emails, and mean mailing volumes increased by 79% in the year to September 2005.
It also found that an expected decline in open rates has only been slight, and seems to be bottoming out around the 25% for acquisition and 33% for retention mark.
The report's author, Stefan Tornquist, director of research for US research firm Marketing Sherpa, added a warning observation that clients will soon need to change their approach to email.
He wrote that in the US the "batch and blast" approach of sending frequent, undifferentiated emails is suffering from a widening gulf in response rates compared with segmented, personalised emails.
"Perhaps worst of all, consumer definitions of spam continued to expand with more than 50% of the public regarding spam as any email 'that arrives too often, even from a company I do business with'," he said.
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