If you use, or are considering using, email as a marketing tool, there are a few things you should probably know before you get started. What works? What doesn’t work? What type of email campaigns are successful and which ones do people delete without opening? Which parts of an email message to people look at or interact with the most?

MarketingSherpa’s newly released Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007 might just be the best tool you could invest in.

With over 3,600 participants, MarketingSherpa says their study is the biggest of its kind in the world. The new study contains 233 charts and tables as well as 8 eyetracking heatmaps. The heatmaps are visual representations of where people were looking when they reviewed an email or where they were clicking. The charts and tables cover a huge amount of information in an organized, easy to understand format. The entire 325-page study is available for purchase at MarketingSherpa’s website. At $247, it’s no impulse purchase. But if you are seriously considering an email marketing campaign, looking to redesign an existing campaign, or thinking about terminating a campaign already in progress, it may very well be a wise investment.

A 16-page excerpt is available in PDF format from MarketingSherpa’s website. The excerpt itself includes quite a bit of valuable data. For instance, almost 70% of the study participants felt that the impact of business-to-customer email was increasing to some degree. In addition, the study revealed that single column forms perform better than double column forms. The excerpt even contains a chart showing the ROI for a number of email marketing campaign types. If you send out graphical or HTML email marketing messages, the included heatmap might be of interest to you as well. And all of this information is just what’s in the excerpt.

The annual report is available now from MarketingSherpa. If it’s as good as the case studies and reports that MarketingSherpa publishes I’m sure it’d be a worthwhile investment for the majority of email marketers.

View the Excerpt PDF | More Details and Ordering

The Internet Marketing Monitor does not receive any payment for linking to this study. We are in no way affiliated with MarketingSherpa. We just really like their work.