Financial Services, Telecomms Tops in Engagement: Pivotal Veracity

Financial services and telecommunications firms were best at engaging their customers with e-mail in the first three quarters of 2009 while retail, travel and hospitality marketers fared worst, according to a just-released study by e-mail consultancy Pivotal Veracity.

To determine “e-mail engagement,” Pivotal Veracity reportedly studied the e-mail behavior of a panel of 50,000 Internet users who agreed to have their e-mail behavior anonymously tracked.

Among the metrics the firm claims it studied were massages’ “read rates,” or the percentage clicked on or viewed for five or more seconds regardless of whether the messages’ graphics were on or not; their “importance and appeal,” or the time that elapsed between when the recipient first saw the message and then opened it, and “frequency and deliverability,” or the average number of messages recipients saw from the sender per month.

The firm used these metrics to develop what it calls the E-mail Engagement Index.

And while financial services and telecommunications firms scored 74 and 67 on the index, respectively, retailers and travel-and-hospitality marketers scored 41 and 35, respectively.

Financial-services firms had the highest read rates, coming in at 34%, according to Pivotal Veracity, most likely because they send messages that tend to include critical financial information.

Telecommunications providers had an average read rate of 27%, retailers had an average read rate of 21% and travel-and-hospitality marketers had an average read rate of 18%, according to Pivotal Veracity.

Verticals with the highest read rates also delivered the fewest messages, according to Pivotal Veracity.

However, travel marketers experienced the highest importance and appeal of any vertical during the peak vacation booking season, with an average time between first view and first read of 2.9 hours in March and April, according to Pivotal Veracity.

Pivotal Veracity also measured the average time between when the messages were sent and when recipients first viewed them in their inboxes, but did not include the results in the e-mail engagement index.

“We measure it, and it’s interesting to see it, but it’s not included in the index because we think it’s driven more by the marketer than the customer’s perception [of the messages],” said Deirdre Baird, chief executive of Pivotal Veracity.

Not surprisingly, the results of the study indicate that the relevance of messages to recipients’ needs and interests has a significant impact on engagement.

“As the e-mail technology and deliverability landscape continues to evolve in a direction that prioritizes individual consumer engagement, marketers must create more timely and relevant communications than ever before,” said Baird in a statement announcing the study. “Improving customer engagement—especially as compared to other mailers—can mean the difference between having deliverable campaigns that drive response and a high ROI, or campaigns that are blocked and sent to peoples’ spam folders.”