Month: March 2006

I regularly get asked about email industry metrics and best practices like: “what is the average open and click-through rates?” or “which day is the best to send email?” My typical answer is “it depends”. There are so many variables to consider. Furthermore, two companies in the same industry doing the same thing will likely get different results. Marketers need to test to see what their own metrics are and which best practices work for them. This can start with simple testing like A/B split testing and advance to multi-variable testing. The key is to develop an internal benchmark based on the past and then work towards delivering against that in the future.
Since I work with a lot of very smart people at “ExactTarget”:http://www.exacttarget.com I have access to their knowledge and experience. One of my associates, Morgan Stewart, Director of Strategic Services, works with clients to audit their email marketing programs, benchmark them, apply testing and best practices, and optimize results. He has done a lot of research that is now public including his study on the “Best Day to Send Email”:http://email.exacttarget.com/pdf/Best-Day.pdf _(pdf)_. His latest research is the “2005 Response Rate Study”:http://email.exacttarget.com/lp/2006_BestDay_WP.asp covering over 4,000 email marketers, 230,000 email campaigns and 2.7 billion email messages.