Are these stats normal for an email campaign?

[mr_nabo]

Hi,

I have, what I think, are some awful results from sending out a large campaign and just wanted to know what I can do to improve click-through rates or even just get people to open the email in the first place!

I use Dotmailer and the results from a campaign sent a month ago show that out of 10,599 emails sent 7,640 were delivered and there were only 1,261 unique opens.

Admittedly there were 2,138 soft bounces and 821 hard bounces, but 6,379 didn't even open the email! On top of all that 77 people unsubscribed.

This was for what I would have thought was a 'good' email campaign (it was about a BBC appeal we'd been awarded), but those results make me think I've failed miserably in getting people to visit the site.

What can I do to improve that or attract new subscribers that will be interested in our campaigns and open the email?

Thanks for any pointers

[epistable]

How many people came to your site as a result of the email?

I would look at that number a lot more closely than the unique opens. I'm not sure how Dotmailer works, but other email tracking tools I've come across rely on your reader's mail program's loading external images in order to count unique opens. A lot of email clients nowadays however block external images from being displayed unless the user requests them. ( [answers.yahoo.com...] ) Therefore, it may be possible for emails that were opened, but where images were not displayed, may be counted as "unopened" in some email tracking tools.

[Status_203]

Where did the email addresses come from? Were they given to you or to somebody else who passed them on to you? If I don't know you and you send me an email with an obviously not person-to-person subject it won't take me even a second to bin it.

Have you sent emails to these addresses before? What sort of content? What sort of content was it this time? Even if I know who you are, if I know you habitually send out nothing of interest to me I'll just delete the email (it can take months before I can be bothered to block the unique address at the server level or, if I really really trust you, click on an unsubscribe link).