According to www.myemma.com and www.constantcontact.com in 2008 the average unique open rate was between 16.39% - 20.31% while the unique clickthrough rate was between 2.30%-3.45%. Do not go into a panic if your numbers were not in the neighborhood of these numbers because they also wary by industries. According to www.bronto.com “Retail Industry” open rates can be as low as 15.9% for example.

I suggest we explore these numbers a bit further because the truth is that you can never get a completely accurate measurement of your email marketing success. Why? Because for example marketing automation tools will count a preview panel as an open email even if the recipient did not really open your email. If you do not set up your automation tool correctly it will also count records that have no email addresses, but were pulled from your database based on your “query”. You may also have duplicate records in your database. Your email tool may look at two emails that are exactly the same and only sends the email once but many times people have several email addresses. You may be sending couple of emails to the same individual under different email addresses and they will only open one of them.

If you are sending out the email as part of an email campaign you may also have a very low percentage per email but a high percentage overall. What I mean is that if you send out 7K emails for example and only 1 percent opens that email but you re-send the same email to the same 7K minus the 1 percent, your open rate will be around 1 percent again. You can send one email out about 4 times 1X per week for example and you will get a very close open rate each time you send the email out. So if your email campaign contains several branches based on triggers or several steps with the same content then you should look at the total number opened from the 7K emails sent. Total the number of emails opened throughout the entire campaign. You may also have a stale database that was not touched for years. In which case your campaign would be considered be more of a “qualifying data" campaign. In such cases you will have lots of email bounces, unsubscribes, students, partners, and customers for example, all of which you may not consider a prospect.

MarketingProfs www.marketingprofs.com reports that amongst 1,224 respondents the top priorities for marketers were average open rate, average clickthrough rate, conversion rate, average unique click through rate, and change in revenue from email marketing programs. I believe that the most important and accurate view of an email marketing campaign is the call to action.

What do you want them to do? If your goal was to take them somewhere and they went there then you succeeded. If your goal or assignment was for your prospects to click on a promotion and they did then your campaign was a success. If your goal was to generate attendance to a webinar and they registered for it, you achieved your goal. So if your percentages are not where the industry standards are there might be reasons for that and you might be able to report on different measurements of success.

Should you need assistance with your database and email marketing activities or marketing automation visit us at www.generationOmarketing.com