idaconcpts » e-mail marketing open rates worldwide

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

Damian Davila — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:18:28 +0000

Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

On July 2009, eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size. Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.

About Mailchimp

MailChimp in their own words:

We thought, “Sheesh, people are too busy running their businesses to learn how to code HTML emails. Email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it for them.” We put our pragmatic programming skills to work and built a simple tool that included everything our clients needed and nothing they didn’t. We made it so easy, a human could use it. Our clients loved it. So we made it available to the public. The word kinda spread.

One important caveat is that MailChimp, despite its popularity, it is not one of the biggest players in the e-mail marketing industry as a graph of monthly unique visitors from Compete shows below.

According to Compete, on March 2010, MailChimp had 648,259 unique monthly visitors to its website while Constant Contact had 6,332,717; iContact, 1,555,720; Bronto, 1,016,602; and Mailer Mailer, 157,437.

As of March 25, 2010, MailChimp scanned over 570 million emails delivered through their system (where campaign tracking was activated, and where users actually reported their industry) and calculated average unique open rates, average unique click rates, average unique soft bounces, average unique hard bounces, and average unique abuse complaint rate by industry.

Here’s what MailChimp found out.

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

This list of e-mail stats is useful to small business owners who do e-mail marketing themselves because 70% of MailChimp customers are 1-10 employees, and they’re design-it-yourselfers. This provides an “apples to apples” comparison with others in your industry.

Type of Company	Open Rate	Click Rate	Soft Bounce Rate	Hard Bounce Rate	Abuse Complaint Rate	Unsubscribe Rate
Agriculture and Food Services	23.94%	4.85%	0.97%	2.06%	0.10%	0.38%
Arts and Artists	17.53%	3.54%	1.58%	2.54%	0.08%	0.25%
Beauty and Personal Care	14.94%	2.65%	0.71%	1.54%	0.09%	0.28%
Business and Finance	15.47%	2.77%	2.10%	1.57%	0.04%	0.21%
Computers and Electronics	15.51%	2.97%	1.12%	1.71%	0.08%	0.30%
Construction	28.70%	8.01%	4.51%	5.81%	0.11%	0.35%
Consulting	16.32%	3.30%	2.50%	2.39%	0.03%	0.25%
Creative Services/Agency	24.64%	3.08%	1.34%	2.05%	0.06%	0.25%
eCommerce	14.98%	3.36%	0.74%	0.88%	0.08%	0.25%
Education and Training	16.64%	3.41%	1.42%	2.09%	0.06%	0.20%
Entertainment and Events	16.09%	2.98%	0.85%	1.55%	0.08%	0.19%
Government	25.66%	5.37%	0.86%	0.89%	0.04%	0.20%
Health and Fitness	20.96%	5.73%	3.14%	6.30%	0.06%	0.30%
Hobbies	18.45%	4.33%	1.13%	2.08%	0.12%	0.40%
Home and Garden	28.20%	4.38%	2.93%	2.68%	0.02%	0.41%
Insurance	20.91%	3.03%	2.37%	4.15%	0.10%	0.30%
Legal	17.34%	2.49%	0.79%	0.89%	0.02%	0.12%
Marketing and Advertising	18.79%	4.13%	1.39%	2.50%	0.08%	0.23%
Media and Publishing	18.43%	3.39%	0.48%	0.63%	0.03%	0.11%
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare	13.76%	2.59%	2.18%	4.09%	0.06%	0.18%
Music and Musicians	13.95%	2.43%	0.68%	1.07%	0.06%	0.18%
Non-Profit	20.43%	3.54%	1.13%	1.51%	0.05%	0.17%
Other	33.52%	10.90%	0.83%	1.66%	0.09%	0.40%
Photo and Video	28.93%	5.70%	0.99%	1.34%	0.07%	0.26%
Politics	13.72%	2.58%	0.49%	0.78%	0.07%	0.15%
Professional Services	19.77%	3.71%	2.55%	3.57%	0.08%	0.45%
Public Relations	14.81%	1.12%	2.07%	2.28%	0.03%	0.16%
Real Estate	18.48%	3.44%	1.18%	1.67%	0.06%	0.25%
Recruitment and Staffing	15.31%	3.35%	1.37%	1.75%	0.07%	0.31%
Religion	23.04%	3.24%	0.52%	0.68%	0.05%	0.15%
Restaurant	20.07%	2.41%	0.70%	1.11%	0.09%	0.30%
Retail	17.80%	3.54%	0.61%	1.00%	0.08%	0.24%
Social Networks and Online Communities	22.37%	2.85%	6.94%	5.44%	0.11%	0.74%
Software and Web App	15.57%	2.49%	1.88%	3.06%	0.11%	0.39%
Sports	19.54%	4.77%	0.86%	1.53%	0.08%	0.24%
Telecommunications	21.20%	3.22%	1.60%	2.85%	0.10%	0.41%
Travel and Transportation	14.50%	2.71%	0.84%	0.83%	0.05%	0.17%

Use these stats to evaluate your past, current and future e-mail marketing campaigns.

Thank you for your time!

4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing

Damian Davila — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:22:37 +0000

On early December 2009, a marketing intern at a Fortune 500 contacted me via LinkedIn and asked me how to get started on e-mail marketing. While responding to his message, I realized that it would be a good idea to share it with the readers of idaconcpts.

The first step is to get acquainted with the tenets of permission marketing and how to apply them to create permission-based e-mail marketing campaigns.

The second step is to learn to establish clear objectives and understand some basic metrics to evaluate e-mail marketing campaigns. At the same time, newbies to e-mail marketing need to get acquainted with web analytics tools such as Google Analytics.

The third step is to understand proper evaluation and benchmarking of e-mail marketing campaigns:.

The fourth step is to learn current practices of successful writers of e-mail newsletters.

How Facebook Does Email Newsletters?

If you have any questions feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or at @idaconcpts on Twitter.

Are you deceived by your email campaigns?

Damian Davila — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:03:59 +0000

Measuring the success of your permission e-mail campaigns is often oversimplified. Marketing managers are often happy to see rising open rates and click-through rates. (If you have no idea on how to measure the click-through rates of your e-mail campaigns, here’s an easy tutorial using Google Analytics). The problem of being content with just measuring open rates and click-through rates from our e-mail campaigns is that we are victims of the brochure mentality.

What’s the problem with the brochure mentality?

The brochure mentality is the mindset that tells us that as long people get our brochure, open it and browse it for a while; somehow they will get “aware of our brand” or that they will “eventually act on it”. Notice that how exactly the readers of a brochure become aware of the brand or act on it is not really defined, it is just left to, yes you got that right, pure chance.

I am sure that newsletter services and talented newsletter writers will challenge the above statement. But think about it for just a second. When discussing with a graphic designer or an e-mail newsletter, how often do you discuss about the actual objective of your e-mail campaign defined in one sentence and whose success can be tracked with one simple measure?

I am not talking about how many people click on your “read more” link or how many people open your “Labor Day Blowout Sale!” e-mail. I am talking about how many people actually end handing you cash in exchange for the product or service that you offer.

Let’s take a look at what Avinash Kaushik has to say on this (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, p. 220):

Before you start your analytics, it is important to understand, at least at a high level, that there several important steps to the process of executing e-mail campaigns:

Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.

I just quoted the first step out of 4 to emphasize the importance of this concept. If you’re a frozen yogurt shop, are you in the business of selling frozen yogurt or are you in the business of making people open e-mails? If you’re a humane society that protects animal rights, are you working hard towards increasing the number of people adopting stray dogs or are you working hard that people click on a YouTube video of a sad dog looking for a home?

Before jumping into e-mail (and social media, for that matter) campaigns, you’ve got to have a clear idea of what objectives you want out of it. A clear one sentence objective that can be tracked with one measure.

Here are some great real life examples that I have encountered during my online marketing practice:

Bake shop: Sell my daily excess inventory of red velvet cupcakes, about 14, before they spoil.
Online coupon service: Generate 5 paying customers during a week.

Not so fast, monkey!

There are several e-mail newsletter services that work great (e.g. MailChimp), but before you sign up for any of them, do your homework. Even though some offer free trials, hold off signing up for them until you have figured out your one sentence objective whose success can be tracked with one measure.

Helpful Links:

E-mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates Worldwide

Damian Davila — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:19:10 +0000

Welcome back!

Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.

Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.

But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:

Number of e-mails sent
Number of opened e-mails
Number of bounced e-mails
Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

With these metrics you will determine:

Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:

idaconcpts » e-mail marketing open rates worldwide

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing

Are you deceived by your email campaigns?

E-mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates Worldwide

How well do you rank against these open and click-through rates?