Marketers using email do not focus enough on relevance, although relevant email messages can lead to sales nearly as often as free, or discounted, shipping offers, according to Jupiter Research.

Roughly one in four marketers launch email campaigns without any targeting or differentiation, and 65 percent use limited personalization and limited segmentation, Jupiter Research VP and research director David Daniels told marketers at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing conference in New York last week, writes ClickZ. Only 11 percent send targeted campaigns using a customer's purchase history, click-stream activity, or other data to send relevant, targeted offers, Daniels is quoted as saying.

The greater the degree of personalization or targeting, the greater the average open, click-through and conversion rates. At the low end of the spectrum, untargeted broadcast emails have, on average, open rates of 20 percent, click-through of 9.5 percent, and conversion of 1.1 percent - compared with, on the opposite end of the spectrum, email campaigns that integrate website click-stream data for targeting, with a 33 percent average open rate, 14 percent click-through rate, and 3.9 percent conversion rate.

Furthermore, a Jupiter survey found that 54 percent of respondents say they have clicked on a link in an email because the product or service interested them; 40 percent, because of the email copy; 35 percent, the subject line; 12 percent, a single large image; and 9 percent, because of several smaller images.