Expectations of Email Marketing
Email Marketing has become a popular marketing tool for businesses big and small. It is a cost effective tool to create customer loyality, drive incremental revenue and reinforce your brand. While that may be common knowledge to most business owners, knowing what to expect from your email marketing is not.
The Beginning
You must keep in mind that email marketing is a gradual process - it takes time to build readership and loyalty. Patience is key.
Your first few sends will be focused primarily on cleaning up your lists - as you will see a high failure (or bounceback) rate. It is very important to remove these invalid email addresses from your lists, as bouncebacks (or un-deliverables) can increase your spam rating.
View Rates
You will see lower view rates in your first few sends as well, as it often takes time for contacts to recognize your messages. You should always include your company name in either the subject line or the send from email address to ensure recognition.
An good example is our OverDrive Newsletter. We sent it out last month for the first time in two years. We had a very high failure rate of 24% and a view rate of 18%. As we continue to send this message and our lists continues to grow, these stats will improve and hopefully restore to what they were two years ago - a very high view rate of 40%.
Also keep in mind that your view rates on a particular message continue to grow as time goes by. For example, a message sent on Monday morning will have a view rate of 18% that afternoon. A week later, that view rate increased to 21%; two weeks later, the view rate was 24%. Many people move the email to a folder for later viewing.
*View rates are actually higher than what you see in DriveIt, as only those people who view the HTML version, with their graphics turned on, will be counted as a view. If your messages are mostly text, a person may simply read the text and not download the images.
Common View Rate Stats:
It is hard to determine what percentage to expect when it comes to view rates. 20-40% is the common range, depending on industry (see below chart).
Marketing Sherpa's Email Marketing Benchmarks Guide 2007 indicates: Most respondents surveyed saw open rates for B2C (Business to Consumer) 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.
ROI (Return on Investment):
The nice thing about Driveit's email marketing is the ability to track things such as clickthru's and view rates. A good way to compare ROI would be to compare sending out an email message vs. sending out direct mail.
Let's say you have 2,000 contacts.
E-mail
Your DriveIt subscription costs $249/month. If you send two mass emails a month to your database, that's sending to 4,000 contacts. Lets say 20% of these contacts view your message - that's 800 contacts. Therefore, your cost per "view" would be about $0.30.
Direct Mail
To send 2,000 letters via the mail, the postage alone would cost about $4,000.
Direct mail response rates are typically very low. The DMA analyzed 1,122 industry-specific campaigns and determined that the average response rate for direct mail was 2.61%.
SPAM
When sending out mass mailings, it is expected that some recipient's mail servers may block the message as spam. Because mail servers do not send error messages, or bouncebacks for this sort of block, you will not know when it has happened. The best thing for you, as a business, to do is take the necessary precautions when creating and sending your messages. Over time, we have compiled various articles and resources containing tips related to this topic. Below are some key points, as well as links for further reading.
Tips for Spam rating:
Include the permission request with every message, as the confirmed contacts get sent the messages through a separate server, which decreases the spam rating.
- Clean lists are important, as the more bouncebacks your message gets, the more likely it is to be considered spam.
- Have contacts add the send from email address to their address book.
- If you have a close relationship with your recipients, provide them with our mail server IP addresses, so they can allow them on their mail server.
Other Resources:
