Email Response Metrics
Here’s a new study from marketing agency Harte-Hanks that will allow you to benchmark some of your email marketing stats against the commercial players. They looked at nearly 3 billion email messages delivered by 100 different companies in various sectors.
Compared to a year earlier, H-H sees open rates declining from 26% to 17%, while click-thru rates remained steady at 3%. ‘Unsubscribe’ rates (now at 0.19%) and bounce rates (now at 5%) declined, suggesting better list hygiene.
How do your marketing email stats compare?
Quoting H-H , here are their recommendations for improving email performance:
1. Keep your mailing list clean. Process bounces and suppress opt-outs immediately. Also suppress addresses that have not responded to your mailings for the past six months.
2. Target your messaging. Send relevant content at an expected frequency. The top two reasons your subscribers opt out of your mailings is because the messaging is not relevant to them or they receive too many emails from you. If the subscriber thinks the content is of value to them and thinks that the frequency is reasonable, then most subscribers will remain loyal and will look forward to your next email.
3. Test! For every email you send, test your top three subject line choices. Whenever you’re thinking of redesigning your message template, test your top two choices. Test new offers. Testing is never once-and-done.
The Agitator’s recruiting effort last week for our donor retention project surfaced the reality that a lot of small- and mid-sized nonprofits have relatively small email lists to work with. Nevertheless, all groups should take to heart the list hygiene, relevance of message, and testing recommendations made in this report … you’re not too small to get it right from the get-go.
Tom
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