Typical opt-in email response rates?

I recently wrote a favourable review of a product, and the manufacturer wants to feature it in a promotional newsletter. This is on a double opt-in email list.

The email itself will be concise, and will prominently link to my review. I need to ensure that my server can cope with the demand, and I'm not sure what typical response rates are. Can anyone fill me in on what sort of percentages of people will click through on a successful promotional email? I'm concerned here with the numbers likely to click through to my site, and not just the people who will end up buying the product.

 

hi, Obelia,

the answer very much depends on several things, including:

1. the list itself: size, how often it's hit, the purpose of those emails (ie. are they just informational, are they always sales pitches, etc)
2. the creative in the email, and how your link is presented (ie. incentives, perceived benefit of clicking, etc)
3. the purpose of your link - is it just there at the end of a testimonial? or is there a call to action to buy/find out more info/...?
4. the number of other offers/links pushed in the email
5. email broadcast time - is this something that's going to sit in inboxes & get read by everyone at 9am monday, or will it be sent during the day over (say) an 8-hour period?

in terms of general figures, i've had everything ranging from 2% clickthrough to 70%, on lists of 100 addresses up to 300,000. it's very subjective.

if you're seriously worried, just ask the manufacturer what their usual response rate is.

to be honest, I wouldn't worry about your servers unless you're on a very small host. for arguments sake, let's say the list is 100,000 addresses, and you're going to get a 10% clickthrough (both of these figures are probably over-optimistic). 50% of those clicks might arrive on day one, the others over the trailing few days. that means you only have to worry about 5000 visits over the course of a day.

unless your site is very heavy & your host isn't up to much, you should be fine. please do follow-up letting us know how it worked out for you though.

 

Thanks for that list, it gives me a number of questions I need to ask to figure this out. I do know the email is going out to 300 000 recipients over 4 days, and I've seen how it will be laid out. There are 2 other links to the manufacturer's pages, plus the usual opt-out link. But my link will be the most prominent.

But I don't know very much about the list itself, other than it's opt-in and only targetted by location. From what I've read on other forums about response rates, I'm less worried than I was about this.

 

Do not expect all 300,000 to respond. Count on about max 5% turn-around. This is a best return I can guess using email.

 

It also depends on how many of those 300,000 email addresses are actually active.

I monitor a lot of my competitor emails and one thing I do at least once every 6 months, is to switch off the email address for a fortnight to see how many of them then stop sending me emails due to geting bounce-backs.

It is (to my mind) astonishing how few actually do that.

With industry average email churn rates of 25% per year, if that mailing list is a year old, it is already going to be down to around 230,000 email addresses. The rest will be dead.

 

I think 5-7% response rate is reasonable for a typical opt-in list.

 

I wonder how much of that is to do with the people renting out the list wanting to inflate their numbers? What a waste of resources, though!

One thing these figures suggest to me is, it would be extremely worthwhile to build a highly targetted opt-in list of my own. The rates for untargetted emails seem pretty dismal.

 

Not only a waste of resources, but also if you send too many emails to non-existant/dad email addresses, the ISP's will start to flag you as a spammer.

That is why I clean my database reguarly of all bouncebacks.