How do my email campaigns compare to someone else’s? August 29, 2008
Posted by marckamaka in email marketing.Tags: business to business open rates, campaign performance, email benchmarks, email campaigns, email marketing, Forward to a Friend, opens and views, opt-in email list, retailer open rates
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Generally, campaign performance should be gauged against prior campaigns to the same audience. How have your recent broadcasts performed versus your prior broadcasts using your old system?
When clients ask me for benchmarks, I say it varies by audience. When a client has purely opted-in readers their open rates are much higher than one who is sending to a) old subscribers or b) a list gathered from other sources, such as loaded from business cards gathered from a conference.
Generally speaking, open rates above 8% are good, anything higher than 15% is excellent.
Retailer’s broadcasts to consumers generally hit the 3% to 5% mark. Business to business is usually double that. Again, a fully opted in list should expect opens above 10% or higher.
When I look at who is opening, I also check those who are showing unusually high opens, like over 20 times because that indicates that this person is either a) very interested or b) forwarding the information on to their friends colleagues and THEIR FRIEND’S opens are registering under the original person’s userID.
Finally, opens and views are counted every time the email message loads (with images), so that includes each time you preview your newsletter.
Notable updates to CAN-SPAM Act released May 12, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in email marketing.Tags: CAN-SPAM, email marketing, email updates, Forward to a Friend, FTC, opt-out, unsubscribe
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The FTC posted on its website today the long-awaited updates/stances on some proposed clarifications to CAN-SPAM. While I need to likely re-read it again to fully understand, I’ll list here some notable changes – and what impact they may have on you:
1.) They’ve gone to great lengths to further define who the “sender” is and who “initiates” the email, for the purposes of defining WHO needs to comply with CAN-SPAM (valid subject-line, valid postal address, 10-day honoring of opt-out, valid permission). This gets a bit complicated when you read it, but in short – the definitions were updated to help sort out multi-party commercial emails (e.g. when more than one company participates in an email campaign, such as participating in the content, the advertisement, and/or the list of email addresses that are used).
In short: Before, if more than one party participated, it was unclear if one or ALL of the participants needed to honor opt-outs, for example. Instead, only the “sender” needs to honor all elements of the CAN-SPAM act. The “sender” is defined as the “person” who is clearly labeled in the “FROM” of the email message. Finally, the definition of the “person” was clarified to mean “an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation, or other business entity.” Prior to this clarification, it was unclear of the “person” had to be a natural person, or could be a business, association, etc.
