Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Email Marketing Tips	August 13, 2007

These benchmarks will reveal where your emails have to be tweaked

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

The metrics for email marketing make the platform very measurable and adjustable, but without benchmarks how will you know what adjustments to make?

To measure a campaign without benchmarks is to guess at its effectiveness—and blind guesses rarely make money.

Marketing research firm Jupiter Research gives the following industry averages for generic e-mails, via DMNews:

• 88 percent deliverability
  
• 20 percent open rate
  
• 9.5 percent click through rate
  
• 1.1 percent conversion rate

Take a look at these numbers and compare them to your email marketing numbers.

Is your deliverability poor? Then you should decrease your use of images, remove spammy words from your subject lines and put white-list requests in every one of your messages.

Do you have a low open rate? Then your sender address needs to be clearer, your subject lines need to be more arresting or you have to provide better content. If people are not anticipating good content when they open your email, then eventually they won't open it at all.

Are people opening your email but declining to visit your website (low CTR)? Then you may want to create more incentives to click through or possibly add more links to your landing pages in the message.

If your email marketing campaigns could use a tweak then some of the guidelines mentioned above can help, and we also have an entire section of the Mequoda Daily devoted to email marketing.

Read through some of our past Dailies and start boosting your metrics to increase your revenue and your ROI.