Opt-In Email: Click-throughs in decline?

[tedster]

In the newest Avant¦Marketer newsletter [avantmarketer.com] there is an interview with John Funk, founder of Exactis and long-time email marketer. He talks about the difference in using email for:

Acquisition: he sees this practice as fading away (I always called it spam)

Retention: he sees most companies as just now learning how to do it well

According to the [Wall Street] Journal, clickthrough rates
on permission-based email campaigns fell from 5.6% in 1999
to 1.8% in 2002.

Does this line up with what members here are seeing? For the sites where I manage campaigns, we're getting MUCH better than those rates, and our rates are improving as we learn to tailor the message more precisely to the recipient's history.

Overall, permission email marketing is in a transitional phase, where
some companies are finally starting to get what email can do, whereas
most companies are stuck in an outdated "batch and blast" metaphor.
~~~
...And so they've broken what we would argue is one of the fundamental
rules of the game, which is: Figure out what the customer wants to get
from you, and send them that.

[rcjordan]

related:

Tedster, the DMA made a 180-degree turn in spam support recently. Reading between the lines, they're acknowledging that the delivery system is being killed.

Direct-marketing group joins push for restrictions on spam [startribune.com]

[nipear]

We are seeing a steady 25% - 33% weekly open rate sometimes it's close to 40% on our house list of 25,000. As for click throughs and conversions we are also doing very well.

[emailtools]

"clickthrough rates on permission-based email campaigns fell from 5.6% in 1999 to 1.8% in 2002"

1-2% is typical for acquistion campaigns (ie. sending a broadcast to an opt-in rented list).

For house-lists, average click-thru rate is ~10% (Forrester Research).