Email Conversion Rates

abertawe
Member

Posted 22-Jun-2005 07:24 AM
I am now doing my research on email conversion rates but just want to gauge what averages people are getting.

I work in the magazine subscriptions industry (could also count it as Gift industry as well) and the conversion rates are as follows (to date)

Open rate of email is 26%
Click thru to site from email is 6% (This percentage is calculated between the open rate and the click thru)
Conversion to sale from the click thru rate is approx 4%. (This percentage is calculated between the ctr and purchase)

Are these figures, well average, good or a disaster. Does anyone have any resource figures or their own which would give me an indication if we are going in the right direction.

Cheers

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 24-Jun-2005 11:50 AM
Abertawe,

Based on a new report by DoubleClick (see the discussion I started in this Forum), your open rates are a little low, but your conversion rates are on par with what major brand retailers and catalogers are experiencing.

The Q1 2005 Email Trend Report shows open rates of 30.2 percent, down from 38.2 percent last year but conversion rates of 4.1 percent, up from 3.3 percent for the same quarter last year.

o2tan
Member

Posted 27-Jun-2005 10:01 AM
Open rates are a misleading metric. Most mail readers these days display no images by default, and others will not display images unless the message comes from an "approved" sender or "buddy".

The mail reader needs to display images to acknowledge that an email was opened.

Clicks and conversions depend upon your offer and its relevancy to the recipient, so even though you might be on par with "the retail industry", how are you compared to your own industry? Or better yet, how do you compare with your own benchmarks? Are you trending up, down, or flat?

A 20% lift in sales might be normal for a software company from abandoned cart multi-wave follow-up messaging, while a 5% lift from the same for a financial organization might be incredible. Add to the mix that the 20% lift for the software company might equate to $1mm/yr, while the 5% for financial may be 10x that.

Set your own benchmarks and always (reasonably, of course) test against them.