Average email read rates around the world were less than 17% in Q4 2012, slightly down from a year earlier, finds Return Path in its latest Email Intelligence Report. Some sectors performed better than others, though, with finance easily beating out all others, with a 27.5% read rate. Business (24.3%) and real estate (20.1%) also performed well, but only 15.2% of shopping emails were read. That was down from 17% the previous year, and may be attributable to “consumer fatigue brought on by… holiday mailing volumes,” according to the report.
While sector leaders finance and business saw significant year-over-year gains in read rate, most others did not fare so well. Among them, news (7.9%, down from 13%) and social networking (6.3%, down from 12%) emails, which continued to struggle to interest readers. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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