Re: Opt-in Emails Opened & CTR

From: Rick Bruner <rick_at_bruner.net>
Date: Thu 09 Nov 2000 15:35:23 -0500

BOB FIDDLER <bobf_at_fiddlergroup.com> WROTE:
> We recently began executing an opt-in email campaign
> for a small b2b client using a reputable third-party
> opt-in email vendor. We were surprised when we got the
> first two day's results and saw that of 5000 double
> opt-in emails sent, only 965 were opened--less than
> 20%! I've done a fair amount of research and have not
> seen any average figures for emails getting opened;
> does anyone know if 20% is unusual. Seems awfully low
> to me. Is there a norm? Of those that were opened, we
> saw about a 10% CTR, which is encouraging, but when you
> factor in the rate of opening the total CTR is under
> 2%--not good at all. Obviously we can look more closely
> at the lists we bought, but beyond that does anyone
> have any wisdom to dispense? Is this story unusual? Are
> opt-in recipients already beginning to ignore their
> email en masse?

Bob,

According to research we did last year looking at email
campaigns from 170 e-marketers (many solicited from
this list, in fact), the over-all open rate for
messages was 51%, but the rate was much lower (39%) for
acquisition campaigns (or opt-in lists, as you might
call them) versus 58% for retention campaigns to
house-lists.

Also, consider the research was done a year ago, and
email marketing campaigns have grown much more common
since then. We're about to revise our research, so we
can report on the trends, but anecdotally everyone
seems to agree that response rates are declining.

Also, open rates have much to do with the quality of
the list, the effectiveness of your subject line and
how well the list is segmented for HTML-compliant
email users; obviously, you can't determine open rates
on plain text messages.

Best of luck,

Rick





Received on Thu Nov 09 2000 - 14:35:23 CST