National email benchmarking report - November 2014 edition

Introduction

Welcome to the DMA’s National email benchmarking report 2013. The report is designed to support the DMA Email Council’s mission to champion email as an essential part of the greater marketing mix and as an effective one-to-one marketing channel. The goal is to provide DMA members with a series of benchmarks that aid their planning and help them make more informed email marketing decisions.

As part of the wider changes at the DMA, the Email Council is also questioning and evolving, ensuring we stay relevant to the needs of members and how we can best promote the email channel. The National email benchmarking report has for many years been one of the cornerstone outputs of the DMA Email Council.

However, there has recently been a lot of debate about the future of these reports and we are now looking at making a number of changes. The benchmarking hub is currently in the process of gathering the thoughts of the wider email community to ensure we encompass as broad a perspective as possible. So if you have found these reports useful over the years or think something is missing, please take the time to let us know via the DMA website or email me at the below address, and you can look forward to new and improved reports soon.

In the meantime, this report continues to signpost interesting trends and developments in email marketing. In this period the emphasis appears to remain on getting the most from tactical email, with focus on ROI but also the adoption of more sophisticated tactics, such behavioural targeting, becoming more common place. However read the full report to get the wider picture and make your own judgements about the trends the data highlights.

The data used to compile the report is gathered from the customers of the UK’s leading Email Service Providers (ESPs). The DMA is assisted in the collection of the data by Business Bound and the DMA’s own research team aggregate and analyse the data to produce the results seen in the following pages. All of the raw data is provided on a confidential basis.

A number of thanks must be given to those that make the report possible. First to Alchemy Worx for sponsoring this study. Second to those members of the Email Research Hub that generously donate their time, namely: Joe Hunter (ExactTarget), Fiona Robson (Rocketseed), Anthony Wilkey (Smart Focus), Marcus Gearey (eBay), Peter Swanston (OTT Pictures), Steve Henderson (Communicator), Rob Hazelton (Concep), Philip Singh (Epsilon), Gary Brandon (dbsdata), and Lynn Hewitt (Business Bound). Thank you to Raka Garg for writing the report.

Once again, Yashraj Jain (Senior research executive, DMA) deserves a special mention for his work in project managing the report, collecting and analysing the data, and compiling the document you are about to read.

Happy emailing!

Matthew Simons
Director, e-MagineBlue
Chair, Benchmarking Hub, Email Marketing Council, Direct Marketing Association
matt.simons@emagineblue.com

National email benchmarking report 2013