How are your emails performing? Latest Epsilon report on ‘open rate’ and ‘click through’ statistics.
23rd October 2009
If you send emails, whether newsletters or appeals, then you should be tracking the open rates; click throughs; deliverability; and ultimately the return on your investment. There are other more advanced metrics we could look at, but for now I am going to concentrate on the basics.
Most of us will now use third party email applications to send our email campaigns (to, amongst other things, measure metrics) with some examples being CTT Dotmailer, (where NCVO members can receive a large discount), Constant Contact (a popular free tool from America) and Maximail provided by Emailcentre.
Once we start measuring and monitoring our campaigns, it then becomes a natural inclination to want to start benchmarking ourselves against other organisations and to ask...
“ What is the industry average for opens and clickthroughs on email campaigns”?
Epsilon are regarded as the authorative organisation on email statistic benchmark reports.
Their most recent report
The Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks study, compiled from 6 billion emails, sent by Epsilon in Q1 (January – March) 2009, across multiple industries and more than 200 clients.
(If you wanted to look at a UK only version report, Sign-up have released a report based on more than 216,000,000 emails sent by UK-based Sign-Up, to clients in the 12 months to 31st July 2009.)
From looking at the stats provided by Epsilon, you will see the average open rate for NFP email campaigns is 24.3% with the click through rate a very low 2.8%!
I suspect the reason for the small click through rate for the NFP emails is that it may contain a large majority of fundraising appeal type emails – which will attract lower click throughs from content-based newsletters, where the objective is providing your subscriber with valued content. A click through rate of over 10% is considered pretty good for newsletters, so I would use this as benchmark for comparison.
Now there will be a lot of variables within these figures (frequency, time and day of sending, data lists etc), but at least it gives you a figure from which to work and compare with. How do you compare?
What is an ‘open’?
If you are unsure of what constitutes an ‘open,’ Mark Brownlow from Email marketing reports, explains the technicalities:
“When your email service sends out your email, they include a piece of code in each one requesting the display of a tiny, transparent (i.e. invisible to the viewer) tracking image.
When the recipient's browser or email reading software (an email client like Outlook) tries to display the email on a screen, it reads that piece of code and sends out a request to the email service for the tracking image.
The email recipient is unaware of all this, of course. He or she never sees the image, as it's tiny and transparent: the whole process takes place in the background.
When the service receives the request, it records it and uses it as an indication that the recipient has "opened" the email.
By giving each email its own unique tracking image, the service can even tell which email was opened. So not only does it tell you how many emails were "opened," but it also tells you exactly which recipient's emails were opened”
There is a but
As more and more of your contacts will be reading emails on handheld devices and email ISP’s that block images, your open rates may be becoming even more inaccurate. If your subscribers are not downloading the images or are reading the email in their preview pane, it won’t register as an open.
A much better metric to measure, and one that I always take account of, is the click through rate (the click to open rate will fall foul of the same problems as the open rate metric). After all, this is what you want people to do - to take action, to go to your landing page. As long as these stats are steady, are above 10% and not declining then you know you are doing alright.
In future blogs, I will take a look at how you can increase open rates and click through rates for our email campaigns.
Other blog posts
Send email campaigns? Six things to consider before you send the next one
How to write email subject lines and tweets that work
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