DoubleClick's quarterly Email Trend Report of email marketing performance reports that in the first quarter of 2005 open rates for email marketing dropped by a fifth to 30.2%, down from 38.2%. Click through rates remained relatively stable at 7.9%, down from 8.4%.

They are interesting results and well worth benchmarking your eNewsletter results against.

Everyone at Athlone was certainly pleased - the first quarter results for our fortnightly newsletter show open rates sitting at 53% and a click through rate of 36%.

It's always hard to pinpoint exactly why some newsletters work and some don't (time of delivery, frequency, content etc) - we also put our results down to the fact that we adopt a very strict approach to data cleanliness - any subscribers who don't open an email after 6 mailouts are automatically deleted from the database. Even so, these stats are certainly reassuring.