It is still damn profitable.

According to a study published in Mailermailer, the percentage of consumers who would open an email toread is decreasing.

The average marketing e-mail open rate fell to 13.20% in the first half of 2008, compared with 16.11% in the first half of 2007. Click rates have also fallen from 3.18% in the first half of 2007 to 2.73% in the first half of this year.

A few industries like banking, finance, religious, spiritual, government and telecommunications have higher rate of opening than others.

In an interesting note it was found that shorter subject lines performed better than long ones. As revealed in previous studies, shorter subject lines performed better than longer ones. Subject lines of less than 35 characters yielded an average open rate of 19.6% and a 3.1% average click rate. The subject lines less than 35 charecters performed much better than subject lines of 35 or more which drew average open rates of 14.8% and average click rates of 1.9%.

But in spit of this and its lack of grammar email is great in delivering results and marketers love email marketing.

Another study by Econsultancy and R.O.EYE said that e-mail was second only to paid search when it came to driving high volume. Not only this  e-mail marketing yielded the best ROI of any tactic.

So whatever you may be doing right now, do put measures to capture subscribers fo your list.

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