From a press release I received today:

Epsilon’s
DREAMmail Trends and Benchmarks report found that while recorded open rates for
the UK fell by 14.8% for the first quarter of 2008 compared with the same
period in 2007, click-through rates actually showed a dramatic improvement, up
from 7.9% a year ago to 8.8% for Q1 2008, an increase of 11.4%.

Other
findings in the report include:

• UK penetration of BlackBerry
  mobile means delivery rates for text-only emails are far higher in this country compared with France and Germany. This demonstrates how the dominance of one particular device can skew results.

• Across Europe, the Middle East
  and Africa (EMEA), open rates for emails are down by 15.0% for the first quarter of 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier.

• EMEA delivery rates have improved slightly, with bounce rates dropping from 6.5% to 4.6% for Q1 2008 compared with Q1 2007, but click-through rates for the EMEA region as a whole are down by 1.1% year-on-year to 8.7%.
  

• Across the EMEA region, the media industry and the services industry both appear to have adopted targeting and segmentation to ensure their emails are more relevant to recipients, and have seen click-through rates improve by 11.6% and 8.2% respectively. But FMCG companies have seen click-throughs fall 9.4%, suggesting they have yet to learn that relevance drives action.

The PR person forgot to include a link to the report, so as soon as I find the link, I’ll post it here 🙂