Bronto.com, a provider of email software and list management services, recently released their first quarterly industry statistics report. This concise, 5 page report provides Deliver, Open & Clickthrough rates across several industries and in aggregate.
Overall the breakdown is as follows:
| Delivered | Opened |
Clickthrough |
| 95.5% | 23.1% | 4.8% |
Breaking it out by industry, the best and worst performers in each category are:
Delivery Rate – Best
- Government 97.8%
- Publishing/Media 97.2%
- Healthcare/Insurance 96.8%
Delivery Rate – Worst
- Technology 85.2%
- Manufacturing/Distribution 91.3%
- Legal Services 92.1%
Open Rate – Best
- Government 97.8%
- Manufacturing/Distribution 37.6%
- Healthcare/Insurance 33.7%
Open Rate – Worst
- E-Commerce/Retail 14.9%
- Financial Services 19.9%
- Technology 22.3%
Clickthrough Rate – Best
- Government 11.2%
- Healthcare/Insurance 10.0%
- Publishing/Media 7%
Clickthrough Rate – Worst
- Financial Services 1.3%
- Technology 2.1%
- Real Estate 2.9%
Across the board it seems that Government publications get delivered, opened and clicked on (Hmmm, is it fear?) while Technology gets the boot showing up in every Worst category. As far as the anemic open rate in Financial Services goes, I think that if any of us never received another credit card solicitation or email that states, “Bad Credit? No Credit?…”, we would die happier, more fulfilled people.
What’s It All About?
Well, compare yourself and your email delivery, open & clickthrough rates to your industry averages. If you beat ‘em, great, now back to work, there’s always room for improvement. If you don’t, begin the process of figuring out why. If you can’t on your own, then bring someone in who can. Why pour good money down the toilet of bad email response when you can easily be realizing superior results in email or through other marketing outlets. If you don’t know what your percentages are then it’s time you started paying attention to these. After all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure and, because of email’s nature, it is emminently more measurable than most marketing channels.
How Do You Improve?
Simple, relevant content with compelling calls to action (you know . . . read, subscribe, buy, discover . . . those kind of things), delivered to a permission-based, well-maintained list (only send to those who give you permission, get rid of non-responders & bounces, remove unsubscribers diligently and promptly, etc.).
These are the basics. Master them and you’ll be well on your way to emailing success.
