Email Marketing can be as frustrating to figure out and implement as it is important to your overall marketing mix! With deliverability, open rates, opt-in, opt-out, list maintenance, and a plethora of other things to think about, it's really quite amazing so many of us are keeping it in the mix. But then why wouldn't we? Despite the trouble...it still works!
To kick off 2007, we reviewed MarketingSherpa's new Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007. This guide is a MUST HAVE for any of you who are using email as a piece of your marketing effort. It includes over 300 pages of information and data on:
- Benchmarks (opens, clicks & conversions)
- Opt-ins, design, and delivery
- Email maintenance and growth
- Email tactics and testing
- Budgeting and outsourcing
- Mobile marketing
Here are some of our biggest take-aways:
- Open rate tracking is important...but not for why you think. Over the years, we've been tracking our open rates and comparing them to industry benchmarks as a way to determine the success of our emails (specifically our subject lines). As we've seen open rates drop from 50% to 30% on average and preview panes, blocked images, and deliverability issues causing our open rate number to skew and lose its accuracy, we now see that comparing our open rate to industry benchmarks is less important than comparing our open rates to our own historical data. Whether your open rates are improving or declining month over month may be more of a telling statistic than the actual number itself.
- Free offers pull a higher clickthrough rate. Double in fact. DUH. But we think what makes this finding important is that it can (and should) impact your email content strategy. Due to the higher pull rate, you may want to consider adding more free offers to your campaigns. Still, while free offers may pull a higher clickthrough rate, once you get the clickthrough...and a conversion by way of a download request, etc...you also need to make sure you are using that free offer to entice an actual sale!
- Content in the preview pane is significantt! MarketingSherpa reports that 69% of Outlook users use their preview feature to determine which emails to open. Since most email users use Outlook to view their email, it makes sense to make sure your email design accounts for the preview pane. Be sure the content that shows in the preview pane is compelling. And, that means leading with your call to action (i.e. Download X, Order Y, etc.).
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