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January 2005 The "State of the Nation": a 2004 wrap-up by Cassie Woolley
This month I thought it would be interesting to review how our client's email marketing campaigns performed during 2004. Our clients range from relatively small companies that only email monthly or bi-monthly newsletters, to Real Estate agents that send out large amounts of property information, to international companies that send millions of emails per year. Open Rates Across all campaigns sent in 2004, an average open rate of 53% was achieved. I was interested to see how these statistics varied across industries. The results for selected industries appear below:
With experts citing industry average open rates of 25-40%, it would be easy to get excited about these results. However, as I pointed out in my column last year, merely getting someone to open a message is not a result to get excited about. What you want is ACTION. Click Through Rates This brings us to click through rates. The industry cites 2-15% as normal click through rates, depending on the type of message that you are sending. Overall, campaigns sent last year through imessage achieved an average 9.1% click through rate. Some claim that click-through rates are also fairly meaningless. Why are we interested in a percentage that represents the proportion of ALL subscribers rather than just those that opened the message? I agree. A better metric is the CTOR, or the Click-to-open Rate. This is the number of subscribers that clicked on a link out of those that actually OPENED the message. A CTOR of 15-20% is generally accepted as "average". Obviously a high CTOR is dependent on the message actually containing links to click on. The CTOR for our clients for 2004 was 17.9%. Again I was interested to see the break-down by industry:
Other interesting statistics A statistic that you don't often see published is the number of emails sent per subscriber in any given period. The award (a dubious honour) for sending the most emails per subscriber this year goes to a relatively small Real Estate agency on the north side of Brisbane. With a database of approximately 350 subscribers, they sent almost 130,000 emails last year, or 352 emails per subscriber!! Interestingly enough, their unsubscribe rate is no higher than any other Real Estate agency. In fact, of our "top 5 per subscriber" senders, 4 were Real Estate Agencies. Summary After reviewing last year's statistics, I have two challenges for you: 1. Focus on ACTION. Although open rates seem to be generally high, click through rates are fairly average. Make a plan to ask your subscribers to DO something after reading your emails, and track the responses to this request. 2. Take ACTION yourself Use the statistics gathered from your email campaigns to take further actions to provide additional services and increase customer satisfaction. As a Real Estate agent, you may offer to provide more detailed information by email to those that clicked to view a particular property. If you are in Travel and Tourism, take note of the holiday packages that are gaining the most interest in click-throughs and offer more similar packages. The possibilities are endless and only require a little imagination. Put yourself in the customer's shoes. I wish you every success in your email marketing in 2005. I hope that I will have the opportunity to work personally with many of you to help you find ways to improve your email newsletters. |