Irvine, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/21/2010 -- SK&A, A Cegedim Company, today released its new free web resource, the Email Performance Archive (EPA), which allows clients to follow healthcare email-marketing campaign results on a quarterly basis. Delivering more than 1.5 million email records on behalf of clients in the first quarter of 2010, SK&A is now compiling and sharing data based on its campaign deployments to identify email marketing trends.

The Email Performance Archive will rank top campaign types by percent of emails sent, open rates and click-through rates. Physician specialties will be ranked by volume of emails received and open rates. These quarterly reports will provide insight to which campaign types are most often deployed, what physician specialties are most commonly targeted, which campaign types are more likely to be opened and clicked through, and other data references.

SK&A’s email deployment product has more than doubled in the past year, growing from 8.4 percent of orders per month during the first quarter of 2009 to 18 percent of orders per month for the 2010 comparable period. This growth parallels the rising popularity of the email channel among marketing professionals. Research firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson projects an 18.7 percent compounded annual growth in email marketing spending between 2008 and 2013. Additionally, Datran Media’s “4th Annual Marketing & Media Survey” recently confirmed that email was the strongest-performing advertising channel for 2009. Since June 2009, SK&A has deployed more than 2.1 million email records.

“SK&A’s summary of millions of emails shipped represents a major indicator of the email marketing tactics being used to reach prescribers, mid-level practitioners and other healthcare professionals,” said Dave Escalante, SK&A Vice President of Data and Information Solutions. “With this intelligence, available for the first time and viewable on the SK&A website, we will provide quarterly trends, analyses and insights that will help our clients improve targeting and plan future marketing programs.”

In the first quarter of 2010, product/service announcements, representing more than one million deployed emails, was the leading campaign type. Continuing medical education (CME) webinar invitations and survey campaigns followed in second and third place, respectively. These top-three campaigns accounted for 88 percent of SK&A’s email volume in the quarter.

Among physician email records sent, the most targeted specialists were family practitioners. Other popular targets for email messages were internists, oncologists/hematologists, urologists, pediatricians, general surgeons and anesthesiologists. Among medical office staff, office managers, administrators and medical directors were common targets. In the hospital setting, C-level executives, administrators and purchasing directors were common targets for messages.

Other highlights from the first quarter 2010 archive include:

• Campaigns with the best overall open rate: Invitations to webinars
• Campaigns with best overall click-through rate: Subscription offers
• Most popular campaign type targeted to physicians: Product/service announcements (64.5 percent of records)
• Best open rate and click-through rate for campaigns targeted to physicians: Subscription offers
• Day of the week most emails sent: Tuesday

The Email Performance Archive may be viewed by visiting http://www.skainfo.com/email_performance_archive. Marketers can also download SK&A’s recently published Best Practices Guide to Email Marketing for tips on copywriting, HTML formatting and CAN-SPAM compliance.