E-mail marketing isn’t dead, and MailerMailer, a web-based email list management service, can prove it.  They’ve just released their semiannual Email Marketing Metrics Report and, as usual, it is full of useful data, charts, and 2008-to-2007 comparisons of e-newsletter performance. If you’re looking for specific, concrete data—open, click, and bounce rates by industry—download this free report.

Some fascinating findings about e-mail newsletter performance:

• How soon do people open e-newsletters? Soon, very soon. Nearly one third of recipients opened within two hours. And within about six hours of delivery, the story’s over.  If your recipients are going to open your e-mail at all, most of them will have done so within six hours.
• What are the best days to send e-newsletters? Sunday and Monday. Yes, people are catching up on their e-newsletters on the “day of rest.”
• What’s the right length for the subject line? According to the report, “Open rates decrease as subject line length increases.”  The data suggest that subject lines shorter than 35 characters do better than longer ones.

Use the data in this report to set goals for your own publication or to manage in-house expectations about your e-newsletter’s performance.  For example, if your boss considers your e-newsletter’s 27% open rate a “failure,” you might want to share this report’s finding that the average open rate across industries is only 13.20%!

Fine print: The report is based upon aggregate statistics from over 350 million email messages sent between January 1 and June 30, 2008 by a sampling of over 3,200 permission-based email senders (MailerMailer customers, including E-WRITE).

— Leslie O’Flahavan