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Volumes of email marketing are poised to increase by 43 per cent this year, according the DMA's National Email Benchmarking Report. Such a rise would boost the number of emails sent from 3.2 billion last year to a figure approaching five billion - roughly the total number of direct mail items dispatched in 2005.

But email could have already overtaken mail as a favoured direct marketing tool, said Richard Gibson, chair of the DMA's Email Marketing Council Benchmarking Hub. The survey only includes marketing messages emailed by 75 per cent of outsourcing operations, and not those sent by companies such as Amazon and Ebay to their customers, which would swell figures significantly.

The DMA also revealed that opt-out rates are falling. More than half of the Email Service Providers (ESPs) sampled for the benchmarking report recorded an average opt-out rate of less than 0.5 per cent for acquisition campaigns in the last quarter of 2005. More than two-thirds reported the same rate for retention campaigns. In the corresponding period in 2004, just 40 per cent achieved that rate for either type of campaign.

"The continued growth of email marketing reiterates its importance as an effective marketing channel - in terms of both driving current customers to websites and acquiring new ones," said Gibson.

"This positive feeling in the supplier market reinforces the confidence that client marketers have in email marketing, and we should expect to see an increase in both the number of clients using email marketing and in the average mailing volumes of existing email marketers."