E-mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates Worldwide

Welcome back!

Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.

Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.

But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:

1. Number of e-mails sent
2. Number of opened e-mails
3. Number of bounced e-mails
4. Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

With these metrics you will determine:

1. Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
2. Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
3. Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
4. Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:

How well do you rank against these open and click-through rates?