By If you ever send out marketing emails, and if you’re an internet marketer then you almost certainly will be, you want to make sure that your emails are getting read by the biggest amount of people possible.
Here are the average open-rates for different industries, taken from MailChimps analysis on http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/:
| Industry | Open | Click | Soft Bounce | Hard Bounce | Abuse | Unsub |
| Agriculture and Food Services | 26.21% | 3.58% | 0.74% | 0.57% | 0.03% | 0.28% |
| Architecture and Construction | 25.84% | 3.47% | 1.81% | 1.33% | 0.04% | 0.37% |
| Arts and Artists | 28.35% | 3.06% | 0.87% | 0.64% | 0.03% | 0.28% |
| Beauty and Personal Care | 19.91% | 2.34% | 0.58% | 0.57% | 0.05% | 0.34% |
| Business and Finance | 21.73% | 2.95% | 0.89% | 0.75% | 0.03% | 0.25% |
| Computers and Electronics | 22.10% | 2.73% | 1.27% | 0.91% | 0.03% | 0.31% |
| Construction | 22.72% | 2.11% | 1.97% | 1.53% | 0.06% | 0.46% |
| Consulting | 20.40% | 2.64% | 1.20% | 0.91% | 0.03% | 0.30% |
| Creative Services/Agency | 23.90% | 3.13% | 1.38% | 1.10% | 0.04% | 0.38% |
| Daily Deals/E-Coupons | 13.84% | 1.90% | 0.14% | 0.10% | 0.01% | 0.09% |
| eCommerce | 17.19% | 2.70% | 0.37% | 0.30% | 0.03% | 0.21% |
| Education and Training | 23.33% | 3.15% | 0.73% | 0.63% | 0.03% | 0.21% |
| Entertainment and Events | 21.81% | 2.47% | 0.65% | 0.54% | 0.03% | 0.28% |
| Gambling | 18.92% | 2.33% | 0.66% | 0.85% | 0.05% | 0.21% |
| Games | 22.66% | 3.94% | 0.61% | 0.68% | 0.04% | 0.23% |
| Government | 27.15% | 3.67% | 0.68% | 0.55% | 0.02% | 0.14% |
| Health and Fitness | 23.99% | 3.19% | 0.60% | 0.60% | 0.04% | 0.38% |
| Hobbies | 29.93% | 5.77% | 0.44% | 0.35% | 0.03% | 0.23% |
| Home and Garden | 26.11% | 4.17% | 0.80% | 0.56% | 0.05% | 0.38% |
| Insurance | 20.19% | 2.26% | 0.81% | 0.87% | 0.04% | 0.22% |
| Legal | 22.42% | 3.08% | 0.83% | 0.69% | 0.02% | 0.20% |
| Manufacturing | 24.03% | 2.75% | 1.76% | 1.22% | 0.04% | 0.39% |
| Marketing and Advertising | 18.99% | 2.25% | 0.99% | 0.79% | 0.04% | 0.29% |
| Media and Publishing | 23.05% | 4.77% | 0.37% | 0.25% | 0.01% | 0.13% |
| Medical, Dental, and Healthcare | 23.95% | 2.84% | 0.94% | 0.94% | 0.05% | 0.31% |
| Mobile | 23.22% | 2.79% | 0.96% | 0.88% | 0.04% | 0.43% |
| Music and Musicians | 23.26% | 2.90% | 0.79% | 0.60% | 0.04% | 0.31% |
| Non-Profit | 25.96% | 3.05% | 0.61% | 0.51% | 0.02% | 0.19% |
| Other | 23.60% | 3.15% | 1.00% | 0.79% | 0.04% | 0.29% |
| Pharmaceuticals | 18.88% | 2.66% | 0.80% | 0.73% | 0.03% | 0.22% |
| Photo and Video | 27.17% | 4.07% | 0.90% | 0.78% | 0.04% | 0.41% |
| Politics | 23.32% | 2.36% | 0.61% | 0.58% | 0.04% | 0.24% |
| Professional Services | 22.05% | 2.88% | 1.18% | 0.94% | 0.03% | 0.33% |
| Public Relations | 21.54% | 2.01% | 1.01% | 0.83% | 0.03% | 0.25% |
| Real Estate | 22.41% | 2.32% | 0.90% | 0.77% | 0.06% | 0.35% |
| Recruitment and Staffing | 21.53% | 2.67% | 0.75% | 0.80% | 0.03% | 0.33% |
| Religion | 27.03% | 3.26% | 0.24% | 0.22% | 0.02% | 0.12% |
| Restaurant | 25.01% | 1.68% | 0.39% | 0.34% | 0.03% | 0.30% |
| Restaurant and Venue | 23.07% | 1.49% | 0.76% | 0.63% | 0.04% | 0.40% |
| Retail | 22.64% | 2.97% | 0.49% | 0.41% | 0.03% | 0.29% |
| Social Networks and Online Communities | 22.78% | 3.84% | 0.46% | 0.40% | 0.03% | 0.24% |
| Software and Web App | 23.50% | 2.83% | 1.19% | 0.97% | 0.03% | 0.40% |
| Sports | 26.46% | 3.67% | 0.66% | 0.58% | 0.03% | 0.28% |
| Telecommunications | 20.52% | 2.26% | 1.30% | 1.07% | 0.03% | 0.26% |
| Travel and Transportation | 20.80% | 2.51% | 0.83% | 0.60% | 0.03% | 0.25% |
| Vitamin Supplements | 17.60% | 2.09% | 0.42% | 0.35% | 0.05% | 0.25% |
The average of these figures are:
| Open | Click | Soft Bounce | Hard Bounce | Abuse | Unsub |
| 22.85% | 2.93% | 0.83% | 0.70% | 0.03% | 0.28% |
To be honest, if you’re only getting a 2.93% click through then you’re doing something wrong. You should be able to get a much better click through rate than that if you’re targeting your emails properly.
But, the best open rate in that entire list is just under 39%.
So how do we get our open rates to 50% and higher, with click-throughs reaching 10% and higher?
Well, of course there is a lot to take into account when running email campaigns. Most importantly there is the segmentation, are the right people being sent the right message.
Then there is whether the mailing list is interested in hearing from you, how well have you managed them and their expectations before you move on to the more basic elements such as subject line and copywriting.
And we mustn’t forget that there is technical side of deliverability. The more people who see your email in their inbox then the more people will open it.
Of course, most people will use an email provider such as GetResponse, Aweber, InfusionSoft etc…
But for ultimate delivery, you want to start running your own mail servers and build their reputation.
Lead nurturing and building up email funnels that create contacts who actually want to hear from you is something that I’m going to look at in other posts in the future.
Today though I want to look at a new tool we recently developed in-house. This tool was made to connect and email through InfusionSoft because that’s what we use. But the principles remain the same and are very powerful.
The entire tool is based around the time that you send your emails out.
What time do you send your emails? 6am? 10am? 11am? 3pm? 6pm? 10pm?
Maybe you’ve split tested and found that you get the best response at 10am EST. If you’re market is primarily in the UK it may be GMT.
It doesn’t matter which because you will always be sending your email to someone who doesn’t want to get it when you’re sending it.
And that’s going to be putting them off.
Different people have different work and personal timetables. Some people can’t access personal emails at work, whilst others can’t check them at home due to families until late at night.
The problem is, get this wrong and your email is going to be at the bottom of a long list, instead of at the top, when they come to check their emails.
But this problem goes much further than simply choosing the right-time for an individual to open emails. It also goes into what action you want them to perform.
Maybe they like to read their emails when they first get into work. But they can’t click on any links or buy any products at work, so they do that at home in the evening.
For other people it could be opposite.
And of course… it’s also going to be dependent on your product. If you’re selling sex toys then you may find your buyers spend their money at night when others are in bed. If you’re selling baby clothes then it might be in the middle of the day when the babies are having a nap.
So the sending of your email should be personal to every individual.
Which is exactly what the tool we developed, Fusion Crunch, does.
It allows you to send your emails based on the optimum conversion for each individual person on your mailing list. It looks at their email history for opens, clicks and sales and depending on which of those you choose to optimise for will send each person an email in the 15 minute time window when they’re most likely to take the action you want.
And that means that you don’t have to send your emails all at the same time!
You can send them over an hour sure. But you can now send over 48 hours, a week or even a month and know that your email is arriving at the best time for each person.
Just doing that has incredible results, for example:
(some emails had no links, reducing the average click-through rate)
You can boost it further by using time decay.
This means that you also take into account how long ago a contact took action. If you look at one contacts email history with you, it could span months or years. Obviously, in that time their situation is going to have changed.
Time decay will place more importance on the actions taken most recently and less on the actions taken further ago.
In order to improve your email marketing, or in fact any form of marketing, you just need to think out of the box.
The additional benefit of using this approach of emailing is that you aren’t sending all your emails at the same time. They’re sent individually. This means you get a higher inbox placement because they don’t look like mass email broadcasts.
If you’re an InfusionSoft user and would like to get early access to FusionCrunch, please leave me a message below.
What do you think?