E-mail Delivery Rates Improve: Report

Overall e-mail delivery rates in the third quarter were 88.2%, a 1.7% improvement over the same period last year, according to a new report by DoubleClick Inc.

Business publishers have the highest delivery rate in the quarter at 92.9%, followed by retail and catalog at 90.6%.

Average clickthrough rates in the third quarter were 9.2%, an increase of 8.2% versus the same period last year. Despite a drop in open rates in a number of categories, clickthrough rates increased year-over-year in the consumer products and services (up 12.0% to 11.2%), retail and catalog (up 27.5% to 8.8%), travel (up 2.4% to 8.5%) and business publisher (up 15.9% to 8.0%) categories.

The click-through rate remained at 7.8% in the business products and services category, while it fell 17.7% to 9.3% in the consumer publisher category.

The report was compiled using aggregate data from DoubleClick’s DARTmail e-mail delivery technology. The third quarter data is based on approximately 2 billion permission-based e-mails from hundreds of clients.