How do I know whether my mailing campaign is effective?
Mailing is an excellent communications tool. From one-off promotions to recurring newsletters, email marketing enables you to maintain contact with your clients, leads, and prospects, and to reach them at the right moment. But to use this tool effectively, you need to know what objective to aim for. How many recipients should open your email for the campaign to be considered a success? To improve your practices — or maintain their quality — you need to analyse and understand this.
Today, we share some guidance on the open and click-through rates to target, and the maximum bounce rate that remains acceptable based on industry averages.
Is my open rate good?
As its name suggests, the open rate indicates how many recipients opened your email, out of the total number of contacts to whom it was sent.
It is easy to calculate: number of email opens / total number of recipients * 100
This rate allows you to evaluate the quality of your email subject line (which is primarily what prompts someone to open or ignore an email) and the quality of your recipient list.
Incidentally, to maximise your chances of achieving a good open rate, a few best practices can help — and, above all, certain types of subject line should be avoided at all costs. See our article on 8 email subject lines that will drive your recipients away!
Email marketing software generally calculates this figure automatically.
A good open rate is above 10%. Above 30% is an excellent rate. Below 10% is unsatisfactory.
The cross-sector average was 23% for B2B and 29% for B2C in 2017.
Is my click-through rate good?
First of all, the click-through rate corresponds to the number of contacts who clicked on a link included in your email, relative to the number of emails you sent.
How to calculate it: number of clicks on a link in your email / number of emails sent * 100
It tells you about the relevance of your email content and the appeal of your links to your target audience.
Like the open rate, it is generally calculated automatically by email marketing tools.
A click-through rate below 1% is unsatisfactory. Between 1% and 3% is considered a good click-through rate. Above 3% is excellent.
Across all sectors, the average click-through rate was 3.50% for B2B and 4.20% for B2C in 2017.
What is the reactivity rate?
The reactivity rate follows the same principle as the click-through rate; the difference is that the click-through rate is based on all contacts to whom you send an email, whereas the reactivity rate focuses on those contacts who both opened your email and clicked on a link.
It is therefore calculated simply as: number of clicks on a link in your email / number of emails opened * 100
Undesirable rates
The bounce rate
The bounce rate corresponds to the number of emails that are not delivered correctly and are returned to the sender with an error message.
There are 2 types of bounce:
- Soft bounces: the recipient's email address is temporarily unavailable (full inbox, specific error, etc.).
- Hard bounces: the recipient's email address does not exist or no longer exists.
Bounces are obviously problematic: they mean that your contact database is not necessarily reliable. And the more bounces you accumulate, the more likely you are to be flagged as spam next time.
The best approach is therefore to generate no bounces at all. To optimise your deliverability, regularly clean your database to remove addresses that no longer exist — and above all, do not add contacts without their consent! This is especially important in light of the GDPR introduced in May 2018.
The bounce rate is calculated as follows: number of undelivered emails / number of emails sent * 100
The spam rate
Here, the name is rather self-explanatory. This is the number of contacts who flagged your email as spam or junk mail — something you absolutely want to avoid.
A spam rate above 0.1% may be enough to condemn you in the eyes of an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and have you automatically classified as spam. Yet another excellent reason not to forcibly add contacts to your database.
The spam rate is calculated as follows: number of spam complaints / number of emails sent * 100
We hope these explanations help clarify matters and enable you to better gauge the success of your email campaigns.
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