Optimising Email - how good should you be?

Some useful benchmarking data to help optimise an improve email response rates. One big supplier, Dreamail did some analysis based on millions of emails delivered by their clients in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) for a two year period: Q4 2006 through Q4 2008, from a range of countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, South, Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The email performance metrics reported averages across all companies in a category - an unweighted average, irrespective of mail volumes by a particular company - to provide a measure of "average company performance."

BENCHMARKING DATA

EMEA - Quarterly trend                                   Q407/Q408 % Change

Delivered/non bounce rate           95.4%               +1.4%
Open                                        21.7%               -5.7%
CTR                                          7.6%                 -12.6%

UK - Quarterly Trend

Delivered/non bounce rate           95.7%               +2%

Open                                        20.2%               -3.3%

CTR                                          7.5%                 0.0%

Trends by Industry

EMAIL METRICS DEFINITIONS

1. DELIVERED

·        Definition: # of emails sent minus # of bounces and filtered messages

2. OPEN RATE

·         Calculation: # of emails opened divided by # of html & multipart emails delivered

·         Caveats: Having preview pane open means emails are considered open, so this can overestimate open rates but only if images are downloaded. Image blocking also blocks the open rate tracking pixel, which leads to underestimating open rates. Therefore open rates can be misleading. But they're still a valuable metric that we use as relative measure, a guideline for consistency or a clue to deliverability or content blocking problems.

·         Drivers: Your newsletter is targeted correctly; your brand is trusted and valued and you have a branded "from" line; compelling subject line. Keep the subject line shorter than 50 characters. Optimise autopreview

·         Note: As inactives are removed from your lists ORs will automatically improve

3. CLICK THROUGH RATE (CTR)

·         Calculation: Total clicks divided by emails delivered

·         Drivers: Preview pane optimisation; captivating and relevant headlines and abstracts. Increased number of hyperlinks leads to increased CTR's.

·         Please Note: As inactives are removed from your lists CTRs will automatically improve

4.  CLICK TO OPEN RATE (CT/OR)

·         Calculation: Total clicks divided by emails opened

·         A measure of active interest in your newsletter and the quality of its content. The CTOR measures how effective your email message was in motivating recipients who opened it to then click the links.

·         Drivers: Compelling, relevant, engaging content, incl. tactics, e.g. whitepapers/downloads, how-to articles; captivating headlines and abstracts; good design and flow