Common Metrics - More Detail

The industry averages for Open Rates

Marketing Sherpa's Email Marketing Benchmarks Guide 2007 indicates an overall decline in B2C (Business to Consumer) open rates in 2006. Most respondents surveyed saw open rates for B2C emails sent to house lists in the 10-19% range. B2B (Business to Business) emails typically pull higher open rates than B2C emails. Sherpa reports an average range of 20-29% for B2B emails sent to house lists. Adoption of double opt-in (DOI) processes can help improve opens.

What else to know about Open Rates

There are a few important factors that can skew open rates low and high, which is why some pundits have predicted the eventual death of this metric:

Image blocking

May be the most significant factor contributing to lower than anticipated open rates. If you've ever wondered why ESPs only provide open rate data for HTML emails, it's because images must display for an open to be counted as such. Many email clients default to automatically block images from loading in HTML messages. If a subscriber has image blocking turned on in their email client, they may still see your email. But unless an image in that email is loaded, it will not appear in your open rate stats. That "impression" cannot be measured. The same for emails viewed as text in Blackberrys, cell phones, and the like.

Preview panes

Can cause your open rates to skew high. If a subscriber has their email client set up to automatically load images, your email may display in their preview pane even though they never technically open or look at your message

The industry averages for Clickthroughs?

According to MarketingSherpa, most 2006 clickthrough rates averaged in the 2.1-5% range for B2C, whether those clicks linked to newsletters articles, sales offers, or free offers. B2B CTRs averaged 5.1-10%.

What else to know about Clickthrough Rates (CTR)

Ideally, when observing clickthroughs, you should compare total CTR, unique CTR and specifically what content is being clicked - this way you can begin to improve where you are lacking and capitalise on existing successes. Also, don't forget to use clickthrough data for segmentation. With zeROIn™ you can set up your system to automatically fill a group based on everyone who clicked a particular link, then market to them specifically based on that behaviour.

The industry averages for List Attrition

Undelivered:

Because the factors that contribute to undelivered emails span such a wide variety of causes, from 'wordy' subject line to brand reputation to the practices of emailers who share your IP address, there is little value in reporting aggregate deliverability averages. Industry analysts do not typically provide data across ESPs either, since there is a lack of standardisation in terms of how delivery rates are calculated.

Unsubscribes:

Based on our own data, we feel an unsubscribe rate of higher than 2% is something you should be concerned about. We also recommend further investigation if you receive more than one spam complaint per 5,000 emails sent.

We look forward to working with you to determine the best solution for your business so contact us on 1800 033 807 or enquire online to find out more from one of our zeROIn™ consultants.