Online marketer Bluestreak's latest email report, published Monday, highlights the email marketing practices of leading practitioners who consistently achieve superior open and click-through rates, the Providence Journal reports. The email marketing leaders had open rates of more than 45 percent (10 percentage points more that the average) and click rates at almost three times the average - 20 percent.

"It's interesting to see that across all types of industries spanning direct to consumer and BtoB, certain tactics prevail for all email marketing leaders," said Bluestreak CMO Anurag Ahuja. Chief among those tactics is the testing of email subject lines.

Leaders are up to three times more likely to test subject lines for a campaign, and their subject lines are only 1.2 characters longer than average (38.3 characters) - but more descriptive. Message content is also longer (almost 60 words more than average) - and, again, more descriptive.

The email leaders use more than 27 links per message to encourage calls to action, compared with the average of 19 links.

The email report can be downloaded from www.bluestreak.com (here).