I am just getting my feet wet with email marketing. Could anyone tell me, as a general rule, what is a good open rate?
Open rate? With email marketing try to practice writing your sales pitches using safe-lists sites. Then move up to creating a opt-in list and using your practiced writing/sale pitch strategies with an interested party. The name of the game is always leading towards building a list. The money is in the list.
My opinion is that until you have a decent sample size you won't be able to track a decent trend line for your list and that even then the number is more of an incitement of wild goose chases than a good tracking data point. The problem, as I guess you probably know, is that open rate depends on typical image tracking and almost every major client or webmail provider automagically blocks images in incoming emails, so unless someone takes the action of loading the image then the image doesn't get loaded. I almost never load images but I look at a lot of emails, so my personal open rate is wayyyy higher than what is represented by the number of times I load the images. Beyond the personal, I look at internal email data regularly on this topic, always on the same basic email list, and I know from the various click-based and financial indicators what a useless statistic open rate has become for us. A company like Buy.com or Amazon might send emails where customers want or need to load the images to see the special (10% discount, coupon inside! - where you have to load the image to see the coupon). On the other hand if you're not lucky enough to be an automatically ultra-whitelisted company due to your market size, then you might be trying to minimize usage of HTML and images in order to avoid the black hole of the bulk folder. In that case, it's unlikely that your customers will feel compelled to load images because there's no compelling reason to do so. As well, you might have one creative where people are compelled to load the images and another where they aren't and your reported open rate will fluctuate wildly while your actual open rate might not vary at all. In short, because of structural changes in email clients and webmail providers, open rate just isn't something that I think any honest analyst could give an industry-wide average on anymore. Not that this will stop them of course; "industry experts" who don't actually work in the field they write reports on have to make a living somehow, heh. If images are an integral part of your creative flow and your call to action then your situation might vary.
I dunno, the larger the better. Millions is always nice because the size usually irons out the statistical anomalies, but in reality most national polling data is done with only a thousand or so samples, so I guess somewhere in the thousands is where you start to get good results. Just make sure you're not skewing too far from the norm on makeup of your list. You know, if you have a list that's 2000 people, but 1750 of them are Hotmail users (just for example) then you're going to get results that are skewed based specifically on Hotmail's policies instead of results that represent user activity across many webmail providers and email clients. Just for example, say Hotmail happens to funnel your mail directly to user bulkmail folders and gmail, yahoo, aol and earthlink don't. In this case, you're going to think users aren't opening your mail because of what you're writing or selling when, in reality, users aren't opening your mail because Hotmail is bulking it and your users are all Hotmail users. Just to make sure I re-iterate what I think is the most important point, while open rate is good to know, it's unfortunately one of the less worthwhile statistics in the email marketing world anymore. I say this mainly because of the destructive power it holds over the imaginations of marketers. Many non-technical marketing people tend to latch onto it (like they often do to "list size" before they understand deliverability) anyway because they're fiends for numbers. This, in turn, causes internal witch hunts when the "open rate" (based on tracking data) drops for no clear reason while the real open rate remained unaffected. This is why your CTR is the number that really matters in reference to analyzing customer response to email. Obviously conversion is the most important number, but it's the other side of the coin. It used to be that you had a cascading set of statistics that went sent > delivered > opened > clicked > converted. You can't rely on "opened" anymore, so just focus on delivered and clicked (and obviously conversions too) for making substantive marketing decisions. Hope all that helps.
One thing to remember about open rates - they're inherently inaccurate. Tracking opens requires HTML email, but I send all my emails as plain text so the larger majority of my readers can receive them properly (some email clients block out HTML messages). Open rates can never be used as a hard and fast rule. I prefer to use click tracking within mails to guage their success.
If a large number of subscribers are opening the email as plain text, then they won't have the ability to click through, am I right? If so, then how can you track click throughs? By the way, I sent my email as html with the plain text option for subscribers that have html blocked. The site states that they can't accurately calculate how many opened plain text emails, only the ones sent html. And, John, you say 'the money is in the list'. What exactly do you mean by that and how is money made? Can you actually make money from people advertising their site or product in your newsletter? My newsletter is information based and sent to my customer list and I am technically not selling anything so I didn't really know how I could make money with my newsletter. Hope this makes sense, I am new to all this. thanks everyone for your feedback.
Text doesn't mean no links, it means no markup. You can still have links, but they're in plain text. The number of people who can only receive text is really tiny though, heh, so I wouldn't worry about it if you sent it as a multipart format. In otherwords, if you sent one email encoded with both html and text then unless you're advertising to a community of UNIX admins who read their mail on Pine, they all got it in HTML.
Janet, The links are tracked through AWeber. Instead of seeing the link like this: http://BardenMedia.com/100 The user sees a tracked link: http://clicks.aweber.com/c/209357634985 (not real) Which goes through AWeber's servers and redirects to the original. The user can either click it if it is made active by their email client, or they can copy and paste it into their browser. Either way, it gets tracked. "The money is in the list" because a list gives you a powerful weapon. You can send promotional messages to your list to either drive traffic to a site, or earn sales of a product. Being able to communicate with a large group of interested people at no cost is a very powerful thing indeed!