E-mail marketing consultants consider an open rate of about 20% and a click-through rate of 4% to 5% to be a highly effective e-mail campaign.
–WebSurveyor Corp, October 2006
With an average open rate of 20%1, properly executing an email campaign can be a great device for bringing in those repeat customers, as well as pull in the potential leads you have been collecting. As with direct mail, telemarketing, and door to door marketing, there are some things to keep in mind before starting an email campaign:
- What does your customer expect? Your customer gave you their e-mail addresses because they were expecting something. A receipt, a coupon, a newsletter, or something similar. Does the message your sending give them content they expect to see?
- Understand most readers forget quickly. In many cases, customers signed up for your e-mail list because they wanted access to something or as an impulse opt-in. If you wait too long before contacting them, they’ll forget why they signed up in the first place. Be consistent in your timing to better retain leads.
- Where does the e-mail take the reader in the site? Knowing how deep in the site the e-mail links your readers is critical. Copy tone and content should match the destination page pretty closely. That way, the transition makes sense.
- Define your campaign success metrics first. Reader interest isn’t determined by the number of e-mail messages delivered. It’s derived from the click-to-open rate. Set a target before you send so you can benchmark yourself on success (20 percent is average).
- Check out what your competitors are sending. It may not be your company’s e-mail that turns off the reader. It could be the volume of e-mail in the category itself. If the reader subscribes to financial advice e-mail from seven companies and you all send on the same day, the recipient won’t read any of them. This isn’t your fault, unless you knew about the bottlenecked delivery. But it’s your responsibility to find out what makes sense from a broader perspective.
