How do email open and click-through rates compare across sectors?

From our 2009 report most sectors maintained very similar open and click rates. However, there have been a number of notable changes, all of which seem to be linked to the general economic climate - here’s a quick look at the highlights:

• Restaurants gained significantly, moving from 20.31% to 25.50% open rate and seeing a big rise in clicks (from 2.16% to 6.14%) - we’ve seen a lot of email campaigns in this sector moving to a focus on vouchers and discount offers, boosting engagement dramatically.
• Music has also seen a big increase, from a 16.29% open rate in 2009 to 21.32% (and from 1.46% to 4.70% click-through rate) - here again we’ve seen a shift towards more value driven fan engagement campaigns (free track giveaways, discounts etc.) which have improved engagement.
• Legal & Accounting saw the biggest rise in open rate, from 13.48% in 2009 to 21.46% today - the campaigns we’ve seen here have shown a shift towards being advice driven rather than sales led and this seems to be appealing to business customers looking for guidance in these tough times.
• Government emails still lead the pack, they’ve shown a drop in open and click rate since 2009 but this seems to be more of a result of a higher proportion of plain text informational campaigns being sent (which don’t track opens and contain the data in the email rather than as a click through to a site) than any other major trends.
• Property was a big loser, dropping from 13.11% to 9.58% open rate in the last 12 months, not surprising really given the state of the UK property market at the start of the year.

We also have individual charts of sector email open rates and click-through rates ranked in order of performance.

Next: How does engagement with email campaigns vary by sector?