Email numbers to make you wince
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on December 06, 2007
For those doubting the importance of educating the broader business world on basic email marketing practices, let me submit two pieces of evidence.Exhibit A: ReturnPath just completed a survey of the welcome message strategies of top marketers. 25% didn't even send a welcome email.
Chad White got a similar result from his welcome email survey in September.
If that number makes you shrug and ask "so what? It's just a welcome message," remember that this message is the email equivalent of the first impression. The one you don't get a second chance to make.
More info:
9 things to go in a list welcome message
Exhibit B: B2B magazine has a nice case study of a waste technology firm illustrating exactly why people like email. It was cheaper and produced a better response than postcards when driving visitors to a trade booth. Lovely.
But check this quote:
"In other words, 245 people actually opened and read our message..."
Open rates are not an accurate absolute measure and, unfortunately, say nothing about who read your email.
More information:
Email open rates guide
My point? The industry as a whole can push new technologies and success stories all it likes. But the most pressing need is still to reach out to those not reading blogs like this and help them understand email better and get better results from their efforts.
Tags: email marketing, email open rates, email welcome messages
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2 Comments:
Neil at buybrandtools.com again.
This is how I break email metrics down simply.
Good Open Rate = Either; good subject line, recognised sender, sent on a good day/time.
CTR= Found campaign / offer interesting, or reminded customer of something they wanted to buy.
Ps 22% open incredible? I would be gutted to have an open rate that low. We average around 40%.
By 
stato77, on
07 December, 2007
Thanks Neil. I'd echo your comment on whether 22% makes an incredible open rate. Except it might be a question of context.
It's a little unclear where the email addresses came from or if they'd been emailed to before.
If the email, for example, went to a list of addresses provided by the tradeshow, then that reflects better on the open rate.
Another point that might have been raised is that the email results were compared to direct mail results from *a year ago*. So it's not a direct comparison using a control group.
Sloppy editing I think. But the general idea that email was more effective/efficient did come through.
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
07 December, 2007
