A new report has shown that sending messages out about events and special offers via email continues to have positive effects for businesses that do it.
The document, published by Epsilon and covering North America, found that the average email open rate in the second quarter of 2013 was 28.5 per cent, while the average click-through rate was 4.3 per cent.
It may seem disappointing for anyone eager to reach audiences on a large scale, but it is important to consider that the average non-bounce rate (which is the percentage of emails that didn’t get returned to sender because they were undelivered) was 96.1 per cent.
Elsewhere in the report, it was noted that 51 per cent of an average email file was active during the study period, an increase of 0.9 per cent on the last quarter. However this does suggest that on the flip side, 51 per cent was inactive, suggesting email marketing still needs to focus specifically on set audiences.
The highest open rates occurred in the retail, financial services and travel sectors, while consumer products saw the highest click-to-open rates.
Vice president of digital analytics at Epsilon Judy Loschen said: “In our previous Email Benchmark reports we have encouraged email marketers to pay specific attention to their unengaged email subscriber population. Our Q2 2013 findings indicate marketers have been doing just that.”
Adding that targeted emails are vital, she added: “Without a comprehensive view of your customers, email marketers will struggle to effectively engage subscribers and drive results.”
At Gevme, we recommend our clients to adopt a 3-step approach to maximise the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns:
Step 1
Create segments of your audience into lists. For example, you can create a 3-level hierarchy and change the tonality of your email to suit the seniority of the audience.
Create a hierarchy to build a custom list for your audience segmentation
Step 2
Personalise your communication by including personalised fields into your content and email subject.
Include personalised fields in your content and subject title
Step 3
Set up in advance campaigns to re-target your unopened email lists, with a different subject title and minor changes in your copy. Often, it is the subject title that determines whether a recipient open the email.
You can re-target your list of unopened email list easily
You should be able to see a double-digit increase in open-rate when you adopt the above approach as compared to a typical mass mail approach.
Feel free to share what has worked for your email campaigns in the commentary box below.
