Better than average?

One question that we’re repeatedly asked by our customers is how they compare to the “average” online marketer or retailer in terms of conversion rates, number of campaigns, customer acquisition, etc.  Many times it’s hard to pinpoint exact numbers with much accuracy because of differences in business model and marketing channels, but a new survey that just came out on eMarketer gives a fairly nice overview of how current online retailers (limited to the US) are doing in regards to email marketing.

For those of you who are curious, here are some good comparison metrics:

• Average email clickthrough rate is between 2.6-5.0% for most survey respondents with only about 20% of respondents reporting a clickthrough rate higher than 10%. Amazingly, almost 15% of respondents say they don’t know their email clickthrough rates at all.
• While respondents had an average email blast size ranging anywhere from under 10,000 to over 500,000, the highest percentage of companies in the survey sent mostly to groups of under 10,000 customers.
• The vast majority of companies are sending out 1-3 email campaigns a month - less than 20% of companies sent out more than 5 (remarkably, some did as many as 20).
• 60% of companies saw an average email conversion rate at or below 4.0% (40% of all companies had an average email conversion rate below 2.0%). Again, it’s amazing to me that nearly 25% of companies surveyed had no idea what their conversation rate was.
• Although the majority of US marketers are considering global marketing, the vast majority of US retailers have not yet implemented a global email marketing program

While these are pretty rough estimates of what competitors might be doing in the near term, it’s important to realize that the email marketing landscape is quickly changing (check out Marketing Sherpa Says Importance of Targeted Email Will Increase During Economic Downturn). As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I believe that email targeting, especially on a global scale, will be the differentiator between which online retailers survive and fail during the current economic crisis. With more and more companies looking to cut marketing costs by reverting to email over other marketing channels, retailers will be forced to compete for the inbox.

So the question is, if you’re average now, what will you be in the future? And how will you protect your current customer base moving forward as others compete for your share of wallet?

Tags: Clickthrough, conversion rate, Email Marketing, email relevance

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, Marketing Metrics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.