Sunday, August 7, 2011

Email marketing: Understanding open rate statistics

If you're involved in email marketing, at some point you will probably be confronted by a table that includes a statistical analysis of your email's performance. This will list the number of emails sent out, the number undeliverable, percentage opened, and probably the click rate and unsubscribe rates.
The open rate is the number most often used as a key performance indicator when measuring the success of an email subject, on the basis that the more effective the headline included as the email subject, the higher the open rate.


Ignoring for now the caveats to that statement, let's take a looks at email marketing benchmarks as reported by www.mailchimp.com across fifty industries. Looking at the top five and bottom five performing industries, we see that open rates range from 15.29% to 36.62%

Top five open rates by Industry

Food                          36.62%
Self-Explanatory       34.80%
Photography             34.17%
Video Production      33.09%
Church                      32.95%

Bottom five open rates by industry

Other                       15.29%
Entertainment         15.42%
Arts & Music            16.22%
Software                  18.22%
Other marketing      18.49%

What does this tell us? Firstly, that if you have an open rate below 15% or above 35%, you either have a lot of room for improvement, or are doing exceptionally well, whatever industry you are in.
Another thing that can be gleaned from this, is that more specific niche target audiences are likely to produce higher open rates. Photography and Video Production both top performing areas, could have been included in either Entertainment or Arts and Music, which appear at the bottom of the table. With the lowest open rates recorded in “Other” industries, as indicated by participants, and an alternative “Self Explanatory” category

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