Clickz.com just published an interesting article on email metrics and what you might expect. Author Jeanne Jennings writes:
Average open rates for house lists are running in the mid-30s (34.3 percent, according to DoubleClick). The range I’m seeing, based on public sources and my clients’ performances, is the mid-20s to just over 50 percent.Average click-throughs for house lists (calculated as a percentage of messages delivered, not the percentage opened) are running in the high single digits (DoubleClick reports 8.2 percent); the range I’m seeing is just over 1 percent to just under 20 percent.
The latest metrics confirm something I’ve seen throughout my career: Third-party lists don’t perform nearly as well as house lists. The gap in e-mail lists is very pronounced, with third-party lists seeing open rates of one-half to one-third less than house lists (less than 20 percent on average, often less than 10 percent). Click-throughs on these rented lists are also lower, with a range of zero to just over 2 percent.
From my own experience, I’m seeing similar results with the average open rates (the number of unique users that open your email / everyone you sent the email to). I’ve even gotten as high as 55% on a few emails!
In terms of click-throughs (the number of unique users that click to your website / everyone you sent the email to), I’m seeing closer to 15% to mid-20% for a number of highly targeted lists. I’ve found that the less targeted the list, the lower the click-through rate.
Checking Your Own Metrics
Just because you send an email newsletter doesn’t mean people are actually reading it. Email metrics give you hard data to analyze whether people are even opening your email and which links and features are most popular.
If you’ve been running an email list for any length of time, you’ll have a great source of data to look at trends. I find that it’s always interesting to analyze the email contents if I get extremely low open rates or extremely high click-through rates. Often the low open rates seem to correspond to the date/time when I sent it. High click-through rates are great real time data to judge what readers are interested most in.
How Can You Check Metrics?
If you’re still sending email through Outlook, it’s probably time to try an email hosting provider that offers metrics as part of their services. I’ve been using Aweber, though there are a number of others.
There are a number of benefits to using an Email Service Provider including:
- Ongoing monitoring of email metrics
- Automatic management of any unsubscribe or contact information changes
- Automatic management of any bounces (and I’ve been seeing about 4-7% per emailing, so it adds up)
- CAN-SPAM compliance to meet government and industry standards
- Setting consecutive autoresponders for automatic follow ups
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