Measuring Email Campaign Success: Click-Through Rates
Posted: September 30, 2009 » by Lead Architect » in Email; Tips and Support
After sending an email marketing campaign, you’ll want to measure its effectiveness in the following ways:
- How many direct sales (or actions) did the campaign generate?
- How many opens and bounces were reported for the message?
- Which links were clicked on and what traffic was generated on the web site?
The amount of sales and responses should be pretty easy to track. Any web server statistics or analytics program can help you determine resulting web site traffic. The message statistics however are a little more tricky to analyze. This statistics, while pretty accurate, are not exact. The deffinition of “success” will vary from campaign to campaign, but here’s a bit of information to help you make sense of it all.
Please note: You cannot properly track the success of an email campaign without a proper email marketing program. (Microsoft Outlook, for example, is not meant to be a mass email tool and won’t provide you with the trackable statistics noted below.)
Campaign Statistics Definitions
Open rate: The percentage of recipients actually opened the email. Not all email readers allow for open tracking however and some text-only readers cannot track at all. As with many Internet technology statistics, an open rate is an approximate value.
Bounce rate: The percentage of recipients that could not receive the message. There are a number of reasons a message could not be delivered. Some include: non-existent addresses (once active addresses that have been deactivated), incorrect addresses (typos, misspellings), undeliverable addresses (the receiving server was temporarily unavailable, overloaded, or could not be found), full mailboxes, or blocked addresses.
Click-through rate: The percentage of people who opened the message and clicked on at least one link.
Industry Averages
Constant Contact, a popular small business email marketing program, reports the following average industry rates for emails sent in 2009.
| Business Type |
Open Rate |
Bounce Rate |
Click-Through Rate |
| Accountant | 14.0% | 5.5% | 14.5% |
| Art Gallery | 21.9% | 6.0% | 10.6% |
| Association | 18.5% | 6.2% | 11.0% |
| Communications | 8.5% | 2.0% | 8.9% |
| Consultant | 13.6% | 8.0% | 12.0% |
| Crafts | 27.0% | 3.4% | 22.1% |
| Education and Services | 18.6% | 5.9% | 15.1% |
| Entertainment | 17.0% | 5.3% | 10.8% |
| Event Planning | 16.6% | 5.9% | 12.2% |
| Franchise | 19.3% | 5.9% | 12.5% |
| Government Agency | 23.0% | 6.5% | 14.7% |
| Hotel, Inn, B&B | 19.8% | 5.4% | 13.9% |
| Legal Services | 18.2% | 7.8% | 13.0% |
| Manufacturing & Distribution | 18.0% | 7.0% | 13.1% |
| Marketing/PR | 13.5% | 6.4% | 13.5% |
| Medical Services | 16.7% | 5.3% | 13.3% |
| Non-profit | 20.0% | 5.9% | 12.3% |
| Office Supplies | 16.5% | 1.9% | 9.4% |
| Personal Services | 18.0% | 7.6% | 12.6% |
| Products & Services | 16.0% | 6.4% | 12.2% |
| Professional Services | 15.4% | 6.6% | 13.0% |
| Publishing | 18.1% | 4.5% | 27.6% |
| Real Estate | 14.8% | 7.6% | 10.4% |
| Religious Organization | 22.4% | 4.6% | 9.8% |
| Restaurant/Bar/Catering | 18.4% | 6.0% | 6.6% |
| Retail | 17.7% | 4.3% | 15.7% |
| Salon/Spa | 15.0% | 6.9% | 7.0% |
| Sports & Recreation | 17.5% | 5.9% | 12.3% |
| Technology | 15.0% | 7.3% | 10.9% |
| Transportation | 18.9% | 5.1% | 13.8% |
| Travel & Tourism | 15.5% | 5.9% | 11.6% |
| Web Developer | 17.4% | 5.8% | 16.4% |
| Other | 17.7% | 5.4% | 17.8% |