The initial aggregated benchmarks delivered at the 21st Century Arts Conference in Wellington showed some interesting trends amongst the 22 organisations that are using Email Management Systems, including:
- Seven different systems are in use
- 5.5M emails dispatched
- 883 campaigns
- 6,250 is the average campaign volume
- 97.4% is the average delivery rate
- 0.4% is the average bounce rate (hard)
- 25.6% is the average open rate
- 2.8% is the click through rate
- 11% is the click to open rate
You will remember that we noted the high competition for attention with the volume of emails and campaigns sent early in the work week compared to the curiously low rate of emails scheduled to be sent on weekends. Is this a missed opportunity for cut through? We are hoping a few Optimisers will test this out, as we all know email response is very measurable!
In categorising the 883 email campaigns sent by Optimiser participants, I noticed that there was a diversity in the types of emails being sent and the response rates achieved.
There appears to be two main groupings of email recipients: B2B (sponsors, schools and similar) and B2C (ticket purchasers, members, friends and similar).
The type of emails sent can be put into the following categories which Vicki has previously identified in her work in email marketing:
- E-newsletters (regular communications that are a publication in themselves)
- E-flyers and promos (promotional or marketing messages)
- Customer service emails, incl ‘triggered emails’
- Surveys and feedback mechanisms
Currently, I am going through the various email campaigns that participants with a compliant EMS have sent and categorising them within these types. Once these categories are applied to the campaigns, we will have a better idea of the potential differences in response rates to the various types of emails you send and what is typical for each. Test emails will also be removed from the pool of data to ensure ‘indicativeness’.
This is where you the Optimiser participants come in. I will send each of the participants a listing of your own email campaigns, categorised according to the schema above, and ask you to check these to ensure they have been categorised accurately.
