Phil Lauterjung

One question that frequently comes up when discussing email marketing campaigns is: what are reasonable results to expect? Results can typically vary widely.  Fortunately, Silverpop recently did research on this subject and I know that many of you will be interested.  The results are based on random sample sets of 7,000 email messages delivered to recipients in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany.  The best part of their data is instead of giving the usual average rates they also included the median as well as the top quartile and bottom quartile.  This will allow you to get a better idea where you might place, and where to put you focus to improve your results.

Here are the areas they measured:

Open Rates

They gave results for Unique Opens, Total Opens, and Opens per Opener.  One word of caution about relying too much open rates.  The number of opens can typically be under-reported because of image blocking and other factors.  This metric can have value in setting a benchmark and then measuring future performance against that.

Click-Through Rate

Here’s where you want to pay closer attention.  This is where you can begin to measure what your conversions are from a particular campaign.  That’s what you want – your recipient to take an action that eventually leads to more business.  That is why you do this isn’t it?

The Click-Through Rate is the number of clicks on a link in your email divided by the number of delivered messages.  The Click-To-Open Rate is the ratio of unique clicks as a percentage of unique opens.  Clicks-Per-Clicker measures how often a recipient clicks links in the same message – could be multiple links in the same message, or multiple clicks on one link.

The key observations to grab hold of with these results is that the difference between the top quartile and the bottom quartile are significant.  The Click-Through Rate was 430% higher and the Click-To-Open rate was 290% higher.  Whatever it takes to get your campaigns into the top quartile results will be well rewarded.

Bounce Rate

This measures how many emails didn’t get through.  High numbers here usually indicate either poor data on your end or email churn from people leaving companies on the other end.

Unsubscribe Rate

This one is pretty self-explanatory.  But, it is still a very good metric.  This lets you know if you are targeting the right audience for your message – a high rate would indicate that you’ve got the wrong audience, or an irrelevant message.

Complaint Rate

This is the dreaded spam response from your targets.  It’s one thing for them to unsubscribe, but you definitely want to avoid being labeled as spam.

I hope that you find this helpful.  Compare your results and look for ways to improve your campaign so you can also be in the top quartile.  Please let me know how you do.

Photo Credit:  Fotolia.com

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