Perhaps your organization wants to start an e-newsletter and e-marketing campaign, but you don’t know where to set the bar for your response rate goals. Or maybe you and your team have already started an e-newsletter and it seems like you are getting a good response from your mailing list, but you don’t know how can you be sure. Basing your goals on industry standards is a good place to start, and if you miss the mark, these metrics can give you a good idea what to improve upon.

In his book Total Email Marketing, Dave Chaffey estimates industry average values for various metrics as follows:

• Hard bounces should not exceed 5% for a good-quality list
• Open rates should not fall below 10%
• Clickthroughs should not fall below 5-10%
• Landing page form completion should reach at least 40%

Hard bounces represent e-newsletters that never reach their intended recipients. This may occur if the address is bad or no longer in use, or if the recipient’s mail server actively blocks your message. It is to be expected that you will receive some hard bounces from time to time, but if you are getting too many, consider:

• Cleaning up your list, if you have been using it for some time
• Increasing quality control, if manual data entry could be part of the problem
• Asking new subscribers to add you to their address books or whitelists

More information on whitelisting is available from another paper posted on this blog.

Open rates give you a general idea of how many people are looking at your e-newsletter. However, do not put too much stock in this number alone: open rates can be thrown off by readers using preview panes (which register opens that may not have happened) or email programs that automatically turn off images (messages opened in these systems may not appear as opens). Still, keep in mind that:

• Lower open rates suggest a problem with the subject line.

Think up new ways to use subject lines to entice readers to open your e-newsletter, but make sure it remains accurate!

Clickthrough rates show how many readers have clicked at least one link contained in your e-newsletter. Low clickthrough rates suggest:

• Relevance may be a problem.
•  Creative elements may need work.

To increase relevance, consider offering your readers a choice for types of content they’d like to see. Alternately, you could sort your audience members by demographics, purchasing patterns, or other behaviors and tailor content accordingly. We will offer more advice on this in a future article.

In addition, review the following creative elements:

• The length and size of the message—keep it brief and don’t bog it down with huge images that take a long time to load
• The position of call to action link(s)—one should appear “above fold”, or within the range displayed by a typical email reader's preview pane, and may be duplicated elsewhere
• The prominence of links
• The structure of links—do they follow a logical sequence? 

Landing page form completion rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your signup page who complete the process and join your mailing list. Although the landing page may not necessarily be a part of your e-newsletter, it may benefit you to add a link to it for people who receive your newsletter through a forward, so we will include it in this discussion. Low form completion means that you should review:

• The number of questions asked
• Privacy—is your policy clear? Reassuring? Reasonable?
• Tone and design of landing page—is it consistent with your website and other communications?
•  The appeal of the message

Mailing list signup questions should be kept to a minimum, at least initially—first and last name, email address, and zip code may be all you need. You can always collect more profile information at a later date, but asking for too much at once could turn people off.

Fears about having contact information shared without permission may also reduce signups. A privacy policy should be accessible from your landing page, and it should accurately reflect what you intend to do with the person’s data, include as much detail as necessary, and be as clear and concise as possible.

A landing page that has design and stylistic differences from those of the rest of your website or other communications may cause people to suspect that the page does not actually belong to your company. For this reason, make sure that your style and tone are consistent. Think, too, about adding your company contact information to the landing page (and every web page and outgoing email message, for that matter) for an extra measure of reassurance.

Last but not least, check that your message is appealing. Does the signup page clearly explain the benefits of receiving your newsletter and/or marketing messages? Maybe link to some of your best newsletter content, to give a taste of what is to come.

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