The benchmark figures come from some recent research by Remarkety, which studied millions of emails across thousands of ecommerce brands.
Sending out regular newsletters is important. It’s a chance to promote specific products or content, or to make your customers aware of any new promotions.
But while email newsletters can take a lot of effort to create, the sad truth is that most people are going to ignore it.
In fact, the average open rate for the newsletters in the Remarkety study was just 23.4%.
Worse than that, the conversion rate was only 1%.
Yes, these figures make a somewhat depressing read for email marketers, but as long as you are aware of them you can at least be clear on what return on investment (ROI) you can expect.
Once somebody has actually bought something from you you’d expect them to be more receptive to further contact.
The open rate for order follow-up emails is roughly twice that of a standard newsletter, at 46.1%, and click rates are roughly the same too.
But what is most interesting here is the conversion rate jump, from just 1% on newsletters to 5% on order follow-ups.
People are willing to take action – whether it’s through giving feedback or signing up to a loyalty program – once they have bought from you, so it is important to take advantage of that.
These figures are perhaps the most surprising.
Despite being sent to people who are not regular customers, inactive customer email campaigns achieved a significantly higher open rate than standard customer newsletters.
There is one very simple potential explanation for this, of course: if somebody reads one email from your brand which doesn’t appeal to them or isn’t relevant, they are likely to ignore subsequent ones.
But if something comes through from a brand they haven’t heard from in a while, or in a format which is new and different (such as a coupon code or similar offer), they are more likely to pay attention.
This includes the inactive customer campaign and win-back occasional customer campaign.
We often talk about reducing basket abandonment on the Econsultancy blog, and with good reason.
If brands don’t keep on top of it they could be losing out on an enormous amount of revenue.
One very effective way to bring people back to your site once they’ve walked away from a purchase is through basket abandonment emails.
The figures in this study show that people are definitely receptive to this kind of communication, with abandoned cart emails achieving a 46.6% open rate on average, and a very impressive 28.7% click rate.
The humble welcome email. Very important to make customers feel valued once they’ve bothered to sign up to your newsletter, but also an opportunity to encourage further action from new members.
Open rates on member follow-up emails are fairly decent at 39.2%.
You can read the full Remarkety report here.
How can you better your chances?
There are a number of steps you can take to increase your email marketing success. Clear calls to action, for example, or offering coupons.
What are the biggest email marketing errors that brands still make?