How Does Your Email Strategy Stack Up?

No matter what kind of business you’re in, you’ve got about a 21% chance of someone opening your email marketing message. That’s the figure (actually it’s 20.81%) for open rates across industries as determined by MailChimp, the email automation service.

MailChimp has plenty of data to address this topic, considering that it sends out billions of emails each month for millions of its users. As the experts looked just at the data from emails delivered by their systems, they zoomed in on open rates, click rates, soft bounces (an email didn’t get through but might next time), hard bounces (an email didn’t get through and isn’t going to), unsubscribes and abuse complaints.

Let’s focus in on two of these measures because they paint the clearest picture for how well your email campaign strategy is working – your open rates and your click rates.

Your open rates tell you someone actually opened your email, which is a sign you have a good relationship/image and/or a strong subject line. Your click rates are also a sign of a good relationship/image as well as a compelling offer and call-to-action.

There are more than 40 categories listed in the report (such as Agriculture and Food Services, Beauty and Personal Care, Insurance, etc.). Residential contracting services would likely fit best in the industry category of Home and Garden, where email open rates are calculated at 22.21%, and the average click rate is 3.02%. In comparison, the average open rate for the Construction category is 21.01%, and the average click rate is 2.03%.

Home and Garden falls in a good spot. Nine categories get more opens (such as Government, Hobbies, Religion and Politics). Yet only five of the 40+ categories have a higher average click rate: Gambling (3.15), Games (3.19), Government (3.65), Hobbies (4.78), Media and Publishing (4.55) and Social Networks/Online Communities (3.16).

The size of the company didn’t seem to greatly impact success. The results of open rates and click rates hovered around national averages, whether the company had 1 – 10 employees or more than 50.

So, how does your email open rate compare to the national average of 22.21% for Home and Garden? If you’d like to bump up your results, there are a couple of approaches to take for improvement.

One direction is related to your customer relationships and your company’s image. People open emails from people they know. As you improve your image and reputation through excellent service, customer retention, strong word of mouth, as well as integrated marketing campaigns, recipients will more likely open your emails. In that sense, success breeds success.

The second direction to take in improving your open rate is in the subject line. MailChimp noted that personalized subject lines (including a name) improves open rates. Implying a sense of urgency is also helpful. Making an announcement gets attention. Thanking your recipients is well received. Or in general, include a benefit or entice with curiosity, and keep it brief.

Notably with email marketing, if you’re not sure about your subject line wording, you can run an A/B test to determine which of two versions has a better open rate.