Which industries have the highest reader loyalty?

To measure reader loyalty, we look at the ratio of unsubscriptions to opens - a good indicator of the relevance of a campaign to the audience. Unsubscription rate alone is a useful measure but doesn’t take into account people who simply discard messages without ever opening them - the worst possible result for an email marketeer!

The good news is that most sectors perform excellently here, showing a marked improvement over 2009’s figures and yet again we see government leading the pack.

What we can learn from this data:

• IT saw the biggest increase (that's a bad thing!) from 3.33% up to 5.33%, perhaps a result of falling budgets in the SME sector this year as we saw no discernible changes in the types of campaigns being sent.
• HR/Recruitment saw a big improvement, dropping from 2.78% to 1.21% - confirmation that the sharp drop in engagement metrics we saw earlier was as a result of a change in campaign format and the limitations of email measurement rather than disengagement of the audience.
• Fashion is a new category introduced for 2010. Whilst the ratio here is high it is perhaps an indication of the rapidly changing nature of the industry - time will tell; in future reports we’ll be able to compare how this tracks over time and hopefully spot some trends.

Next: How do open rates vary by sector?