Email Marketing Results For Ireland
May 13, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I’ve been in this game for quite a long time. And it occurred to me recently that I’m sitting on some pretty interesting data about email marketing results achieved for Irish clients. I’ve decided to share.
A Couple Of Things To Note:
- I’m deliberately keeping them vague so as to protect identities of my clients.
- These are the kind of results you’d expect to achieve with lists of up to 3,000. If you’re using lists with larger numbers than that, that are less cleaned, you might expect to achieve slightly different results.
Email Marketing Results For Ireland
I’ve been managing email campaigns for Irish clients since 2003. The following is a summary of results for campaigns going back to April 2007.
- Two full years of data – I’m no statistician, so didn’t have desire to go back further
- Clients ranging from B2B, B2C, not-for-profit
What is the average open rate?
You’ve got two types of lists here – those who know their list very well and those who know their list not so well. Please note that clients are always asked to confirm that they are legally compliant on the lists they supply.
- Know list well + personalised: 35.6%
- Know list well + non personalised: 28.0%
This proves that people are more likely to open your email if you address it to them.
- Know list vaguely + personalised: 22.1%
- Know list vaguely + non personalised: 22.0%
When people don’t know you that well, it doesn’t matter if you personalise or not. You’re going to get slightly less than 1 in 4 opening.
What is the average click rate?
- Know list well + personalised: 41.6%
- Know list well + non personalised: 30.5%
Conclusion: people are more likely to click links in your email if you’ve engaged them by addressing it to them.
- Know list vaguely + personalised: 26.5%
- Know list vaguely + non personalised: 34.0%
Conclusion: if you’re sending to a list you don’t know well you’re better off sending it without personalisation.
The Initial Buzz
In our experience, there’s often a fall-off in open and click rates for service companies after the initial send. When managing email campaigns, we’re more interested in the average click and open rates from the second send onwards. It’s easier to identify trends when you exclude the initial send. But for ecommerce sites, while open rates stay more or less the same, clicks rise. If you’re an ecommerce site and you’re not actively emailing, you should!
The Importance Of List Cleaning
We’re always banging on about the importance of list cleaning. See here for more info.
It’s worthwhile to look at your bounces every couple of sends and either convert them back to live email addresses or remove them from your list. What’s the point of marketing to people who are ‘dead addresses’? Some clients partake of this service and the results are really positive:
- Open rates on lists that have been cleaned increase by 6.8% from the first send to the second send.
- Click rates on cleaned lists still go down from send 1 to send 2 by 11.2%.
I hope this information is helpful to you if you’re planning to introduce email marketing to your marketing mix. Or if you’re a competitor and you’re having a look, I hope these excellent results sit up and make you take note! I believe that we achieve higher rates than average on our client campaigns because we offer a complete email marketing service:
- Planning – based on what we know works
- List building
- Layouts that work
- Design that begs to be opened
- Copywriting that makes even the dryest content sing
- Template construction that breaks the balls of most email clients
- On time delivery
- Reporting – that comes from an inherently nosy place. I love to get to know your lists through their actions!
When you can have all this for the same price as licensing someone else’s software, it’s a no-brainer to go to Brightspark.
The results above are available to download for the pdf lovers out there. Feel free to pass around.
Tags: Email Marketing Ireland
Comments (2 responses)
Very interesting, gives me a benchmark against which I can measure my stats.
Thanks
James
@James – actually you mentioned in a recent email to me that your recent redesign (by Brightspark!) has led to an increase in clicks to the products and services part of the site by 150%. I don’t want to brag but… that’s kind of good.
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