Benchmarking Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Robert Bahn, ASU SBTDC Welcomes Attendees

 What is Your Industry “Open Rate” for Your Email Marketing Campaigns?    

Tuesday the ASU Small Business and Technology Development Center held a free 2 hour “Lunch n’ Learn” Introduction to Professional E-Mail Marketing.  We had a great turnout with  folks from a wide variety of businesses coming in from the heat .  After the workshop I had several folks e-mail me asking what kind of “open-rates”from subscribers they should expect and was there any difference in open rates across types of industries.  Great question and since I had several requests with the  same question I assume others had the same question who just didn’t ask.  And since I am starting to get the hang of this blogging thing…thought it would be a good topic for today’s blog.     

I did a Google search for E-mail Open Rates by Industry limited the search to past 6 months to get the most current data.  There are a lot of articles out there on open rates with a lot of sites offering suggestions on how to improve your open rates that you may want to visit.  But the best information I came across by types of industries came from one of Constant Contact’s competitiors  MailChimp.  In their Email Marketing Resources they had published a pretty extensive list.  I have included a sample of the chart here, notice that their information aslo covers:  

• Click rate
• Soft bounce rate
• Hard bounce rate
• Abuse complaint rate (spam report)
• Unsubscribed rate as well

To see MailChimp’s  entire chart go Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry from MailChimp.   At the end of the chart the writer also provides some very good tips for improving your stats.  MailChimp also had an excellent table on “Improving Your Email Open Rate” that lists suggestions to improve your open rates.       

I also found some additional industry open rate information from another site: mailermailer and their Email Marketing Metrics Report, although not as detailed as MailChimp.  Still worth visiting.       

While industry averages are always good benchmarking tool for any business trying to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign, it really isn’t so much benchmarking how you compare to the industry as it is:  

 HOW DO YOU TRACK YOUR OWN IMPROVEMENT?    

If you use Email marketing and have the tools like those provided with Constant Contact or most of their competitors you have the analytics available to you that will show 1) how many subscribers opened your email 2) whether they clicked on other links you provided, 3) used your calls to action, etc.    

So you should implement some of the suggestions on improving your open rate and then compare to previous campaigns.  If changing the Subject Line resulted in a improvement in openings then store that for future use.  If by changing the time of day the email is delivered..then change your delivery times.  You get the idea.  The real takeaway is you know what Industry averages are now, you know what the open rates were for your last email campaign now start changing some of the variables (subject line, from line, delivery time,  image issue, etc) and compare.     

Hope this article was helpful to all of our small business friends who came to the workshop Tuesday and to any of our readers who use Email marketing even if you didn’t make the workshop.  We have another Professional Email Marketing Seminar coming up on the ASU campus on Tuesday, August 17th from 1-4 pm that you may want to attend.  More information about the workshop can be found at Professional Email Marketing Seminar.

Love to get your feed back on this article so please leave comments, suggestion, questions, etc.  and feel free to share with a friend.

Tagged as: Email Marketing, small business marketing