The latest report on email marketing statistics just arrived in my inbox from MailerMailer LLC, an email service provider that publishes this report twice a year.
Below are some of the more interesting trends. Compare them to your ezine stats to see how you’re stacking up. And for those of you who don’t have an ezine, I’ll use stats from some of our clients to illustrate the point. (Note: Coaching was not separated out as a separate industry. I looked at stats for “Consulting” and “Education/Training” for comparison purposes.)
Open rates continued their downward trend. (Open rate is calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the number sent.) The average across all industries was 14%, down from 16% in the first half of 2007; education/training was about the same, while consulting had an average open rate of about 7.5%, down from 11%. We, too have noticed an overall decline in our clients’ open rates, though they regularly measure 20-45%.
Open rate is not a super-reliable measure of how many people are reading your newsletter. That’s partly due to the proliferation of handheld devices such as Blackberries, which do not register an “open” when viewing emails; the same is true when people view their email exclusively through preview panes. But it’s still an indicator that can give you information as you track it over the months.
Click rates remained fairly stable. (Click rate is roughly the number of clicks divided by the number of opportunities to click.) The average across all industries was just under 3%, compared with just over 3% in the first half of 2007; education/training was about 2.5% and virtually unchanged from the first half, while consulting had an average click rate of less than 1%, down from 1.5%. This was surprising to me, as we see click rates of 7-20% for our clients’ ezines.
The report indicates that this stability in click rates probably means that ezines are still being read as much as they were in early 2007, even though open rates would seem to indicate otherwise.
Best emailing days of the week have changed. For the last couple of years, I’ve heard Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mentioned as the best emailing days. But noooooo. The MailerMailer report says the days that show the highest open rates and click rates are both early in the week (Monday and Tuesday) and the weekend. We’ve always sent our client ezines out on the first of the month, except when that fell on a weekend. I’m changing that policy immediately! Of course, if you’ve experienced better stats sending your ezine on a Wednesday afternoon (or whenever), then that’s what you should do.
I’ll be discussing more findings from the report again next Wednesday and giving some specific tips for improving the effectiveness of your ezine and other email marketing. In the meantime, if you’d like to look at the report in its entirety, you can view it here: www.newslettersforcoaches.com.
Linda Claire Puig is a newsletter-marketing expert and a writer with 25 years’ professional experience. She is president of Claire Communications, which provides newsletter solutions to busy coaches, therapists and other professionals who want to keep their name and expertise in front of the communities they serve. She is also the co-organizer of Day of Marketing, a 1.5 day training for coaches, therapists and other private practice professionals by 10 marketing experts. Day of Marketing will be held May 16-17, 2008, at Columbia University in New York City. See www.dayofmarketing.com for early-bird pricing.
Linda, thanks for notes about our email marketing metrics report.
It’s not surprising that you are experiencing higher open and click
rates. I think you have a tighter relationship with your readers,
which makes a big difference. We’ve found that even for some of our
own newsletters, our rates are much higher than what we see when we
aggregate the numbers across the board. It all boils down to
relationships and providing worthwhile content. Keep up the good
work. All the best, Raj