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Great question - unfortunately its difficult to give you a simple answer.
Your email campaign return should be tied to what you want your recipients to do. Is your goal to get them to come back to the website to learn more? Is it to get them to buy something? Is it simply to keep yourself top of mind with them? Each of these are very different goals, and it is important that you know ahead of time what you want your campaign to accomplish and then make sure you can measure its effectiveness based on your goals.
The effectiveness of the campaign will also be influenced by the quality of your list, how effective and compelling your message is, and how well the campaign is executed. Nothing will kill a response rate like sending out 100 copies of each message to each person on your list!
In the end though, people always come back to the statistics and measurements of success - and email campaign management solutions make this quite easy in many cases. The problem with trying to compare your results with what's being published in the media often lie in the definitions of what you are tracking.
I strongly recommend you read the following article entitled "62% response rate on Email Campaigns" which explores the lack of standards in campaign measurements and how easy it is to measure the wrong things.
http://www.gotmarketing.com/Services/GotExperts/article.cfm?topic=Response_rates
In the end, we all like to compare our campaign results to those of others like us. So here are some stats to add to your data points. Remember that every campaign is different but if you do get results that are far less than or far greater than these, it does suggest that you need to investigate the other factors I mentioned.
An IMT Strategies Web Survey of eMarketers distinguishes between campaigns designed to acquire new customers which had average click through rates of 13%, and campaigns designed to retain customers which had click through rates of 20%.
Forrester Research found that in-house lists tend to produce higher click through rates (10%) than rented lists (3.5%).
Forrester also found that marketers who outsource the delivery and list management of their email campaigns have higher conversion rates than those who do it in-house.
But what do the real people think? Scroll down on this link to see the results of a survey we did of real email campaign users - they tend to be small and mid-size companies with limited budgets who are all just starting out with email campaigns. This is the real world speaking.
http://www.gotmarketing.com/Services/GotExperts/gotexperts.cfm?topic=Direct_Mail
Here too are some hints on how to improve your response rate regardless of your campaign objectives.
http://www.gotmarketing.com/Services/GotExperts/article.cfm?topic=Direct_Mail
Good luck, I'd love to hear how it went.
Lynda
For more information, check out searchCRM's Best Web Links on Direct/Email Marketing.
This was first published in March 2001
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