Yesterday we talked about what a good response rate was for direct mail.
As with direct mail, bulk email responses are all over the board too, but there are a lot of different factors to take into consideration..
The goal of purchased bulk email lists should be lead capture.
There are 5 factors to take into consideration.
- The quality of the list.
- The Open Rate.
- The actual message.
- The Click Through Rate.
- The landing page conversion.
The quality of the list.
I’m not going to beat a dead horse… if the quality of the email list sucks, the entire email campaign will suck… no matter how good the other things are.
The Open Rate.
This is the actual number of emails that are opened. If your headline isn’t attention grabbing, your emails aren’t going to get opened. You can read here the best email headlines I’ve used and why.
A good open rate is 3-5%… If you send 1,000,000 emails… 30,000 -50,000 people should open up the email and read it.
The actual message.
It needs to be compelling and have a minimum of 3 links to click on. Don’t give away too much information. Be careful though, if you don’t give enough info people won’t be compelled to click through.
Creating the email message is where most people fail.
The Click Through Rate.
This is the number of people who click through to your landing page/ squeeze page/ lead capture page. The goal is to have a 15-20% Click Through Rate… That means if 30,000 people open and read your email, you want 4,500 – 6,000 to see your actual offer.
Landing Page Conversion.
The goal of your landing page is to get their name, email address and permission to contact them again. This is paramount. If your Landing Page doesn’t convert, you’re dead in the water.
The way to preemptively determine what your conversion rate will be is to take your standard conversion rate from people you’ve directed to that page and cut it in half. The reason is that these people aren’t currently in search mode on the Internet. They just opened an email and are curious.
Bulk Email Response Rate.
Now take the number of people who opened your email and divide that by the total number of emails you sent out… This will give you your Open Rate.
Now take the number of people who Clicked Through the links in your email message and divide that by the number of people who opened your email… This will give you your Click Through Rate.
Now take the number of people who filled out your landing page information and divide it by the number of people who Clicked Through… This will give you your Bulk Email Response Rate.
The best bulk email response rate I’ve ever had was 17%… The worst was 0%…
