If you’re looking to find out what typical open rates are for various B-C or B-B email marketing, you should pick up the 2009 Email Marketing benchmark guide. It’s full of interesting information regarding email marketing trends. Since Astonish Results does a fair amount of B-C email marketing in the insurance vertical, it’s a great resource to see how well we’re doing. In many cases we’re above the averages.
That brings me to my next point. Not ALL email messages are created equal. There’s a great rule you can apply to email marketing (and all marketing for that matter) called the 40/40/20 rule. The rule states that the bulk of response opportunity in any marketing campaign comes from:
(a) The List (40%)
(b) The Offer (40%)
(c) The Creative (20%)
That means if you get a and b right, you’re going to have a successful email marketing campaign. Where people go wrong is by blasting out email (the offer) to people (the list) that really have no interest in their product or services. These campaigns typically have a low open rate (< 1%) and even lower click through rate.
You’re much better off focusing on building a targeted email list. The more targeted you can be (i.e. the more you know your audience) the better you’ll be as hitting your target audiences’ hot button points.