email campaign statistics

[Joop]

If I'm reading it correctly, according to Constant Contact which we use for our email campaigns, the average click through response to emails sent is just under 9 percent.

Does this sound right? It sounds much too low to me, but maybe the 9% is just for contant contact and other webmasters have better results?

[corbing]

Generally speaking, a 9% response rate to an ecommerce email offer is above average.

Internet Retailer did a survey on this a while back - I thought I remembered one from a couple months ago but all I see on their website is a Sept. 2004 survey.
Here's what they found: [internetretailer.com]

Q2 click-through rates declined to 6.3% from 6.7% for retail-and-catalog; to 7.6% from 10.7% for consumer products; and to 8.1% from 9.3% for travel. Click-through rates for consumer services stayed virtually the same, inching upward to 8.7% from 8.6%, even though consumer services experienced a decline in its delivery rate.

[Joop]

Does 'click through rate' mean those who actually bought something at the end of it, or just those who visited the website via the link?

[corbing]

CTR is just those that clicked on a link in the email. They may or may not have made a purchase.

[jsinger]

Great topic. This group almost never discusses email advertising. Years ago it was the best way to go. Now it's close to extinct among legitimate retailers. We still get some value from our list.

Our click thru rate is just a few % and going down all the time. Our list is big and rather old.

Constant Contact's rate may be high because most of their users are new to email marketing and have tiny lists. It's easy to have a 9% CTR if your list consists of 100 addresses from the past 3 months. Far better to have 100,000 addresses with a 1% response, but such large mailers aren't using CC.

My guess is that 90% of new sites give up on email marketing quickly even tho their CTR is good. They don't achieve a big enough list to warrant the work involved with regular mailings.

Most new sites don't even seem to collect prospect emails anymore.

[jsinger]

Does Constant Contact advertise this figure from that excellent article?

The overall average number of orders per delivered e-mail declined to 0.22%, which was down 26.7% from Q2 of last year.

Better have a few thousand addresses to get started unless you're selling aircraft carriers.

[Joop]

Our CPR using Constant Contact is around 40% on a list of just over 2000. Our failure to deliver rate is about 1%.

Now we just need to get more people to join our list :-) which perhaps should be a new thread...

[thinkbig]

i have about 65k emails in my list and CC wants alot of money, actually upwards of 200$+ if i recall. I was thinking about using Pro Auto Responder for 18$ they will do unlimited emails plus it looks like they have alot of perks. Anyone used them?