Overall volumes
Its getting tougher with more and more messages sent each year. It is estimated by the Radicati group that e-mails sent increased from 5.1 million per day in 2000 to 135 million messages in 2005. A lower volume was indicated by IDC who predicted that nearly 84 billion emails would be sent daily in 2006. Of these, more than 33 billion would be spam messages.
In the UK, we saw, in 2005, the first fall in overall direct mail volumes for six years as assessed by the Direct Mail Information Service. Contrast this with commercial, permission-based e-mail which has increased in volume for the last few years. The best place for UK data on e-mail marketing response is the DMA. They are about to update their data for 2005, but at the last count for 2004, over 100 million commercial e-mails were being sent per month by the biggest e-mail service providers.
Responsiveness
The latest UK DMA data I have seen (Q4 '04) shows open rates at around 35% for B2C retention campaigns and around 40% for B2B retention. Unique clicks are around 8% and 12% respectively.
For the US and Europe, Doubleclick is slightly more up-to-date. They have just made public their latest E-mail trends report
SPAM
SPAM is still significant with IDC who predicted that over a third (33 billion) of the 84 billion sent daily would be spam messages.
False positives‘False positives’ are where permission-based e-mails may be bounced or placed into Junk-mail boxes or simply deleted if the receiving system assesses that they are SPAM. Although deliverability rates remain high, it may be that some e-mails that appear to be delivered do not get through to their recipients.