Email slips

Fewer Clicks but More Follow-Through - New York Times: "DoubleClick, maker of the popular e-mail marketing service DARTmail, released statistics in August showing that consumers were opening direct-marketing e-mail messages less often than last year, but were more likely to end up buying products if they clicked on the links in such messages. (The data, gathered from several billion messages, compared the second quarter of 2005 with the same period in 2004.)
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DoubleClick offers a few possible explanations for this discrepancy. First, consumers may be more selective, clicking on e-mailed links only when they are in the market for the products advertised. This means that fewer e-mail messages are being opened, but each opened message is finding a readier target.

Eric Kirby, general manager of DoubleClick e-mail solutions, said recipients now will open the advertising messages 'when they actually have a reason to act.'

Technology may also be lowering the open rate. Spam filters may be deleting messages before their recipients even see them. And some e-mail programs can prevent messages from downloading images when viewed, blocking the mechanism DoubleClick uses to register when a message is opened"