I was speaking to one of our clients today about his experience with his email newsletter. He said that it’s been positive in letting folks out there know that the organization is active and informing them of the organization’s work.
I asked him what Vertical Response was reporting as the open rate, and he said somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% (a little bit less, I believe). I looked around to see what average open rates might be, and clearly there’s going to be a wide range dependent on a lot of particulars.
The article below qualifies the response but finally gives a “25%” open rate as an average for the typical opt-in marketing email.
http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/email-open-rates/
Obviously there are a lot of qualifications, but it is clear that the email marketing support Dayspring provided is achieving good results.
Tags: email newsletters, statistics
Here’s a great table of open rates, clickthrough rates and other data from MailChimp, aggregated across their customers and broken down by industry.
http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email_marketing_benchmarks_for_small_business/
As an example, for “Web Design”, these are the numbers they have:
Open: 27.42%
Click: 6.90%
Soft Bounce: 2.45%
Hard Bounce: 5.05%
Abuse Complaints: 0.09%
Unsubscribe: 0.37%
It looks like if you get anything other than a very minimal amount of abuse complaints or unsubscribes you should take a look at what you’re doing carefully.