Understand The Numbers In E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing, like most marketing, is a numbers game. If you have 5,000 people on your list, not all of them are going to buy something from you. In fact, not even 10% of those people are going to purchase from you, and I've drawn an "artistic" diagram to show why. Here's how the numbers in e-mail marketing work for or against you:
There are several key metrics that determine how profitable your list can be, and they are:
1. Open Rate - The percentage of people that open and read your e-mails regularly. Not every single person is waiting at their computer for your e-mails. Most of them are not going to open it immediately, and in the course of time they usually forget about it or accidentally delete it from their e-mail inbox. An open-rate of 20% is ok, 30% is standard, and anything above that is very good.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR) - This measures how many people click on the links in your e-mail. Again, not everyone is going to do that, no matter how hard you try. A 40% click-through rate, from my testing, is a good figure. I also noticed that the CTR decreases significantly when you have more than one link in a single e-mail. Always keep it simple, and don't promote multiple products within a single e-mail.
3. Conversion Rate - This is the percentage of people who respond to your offer or buy your product. The industry standard is 1%, and as pathetic as that may sound, it takes a considerable amount of skill and persuasion to get that figure. If the sales page is good, and the product offer is attractive, you can get a higher figure. I get a conversion of between 5-17% when selling my own products, simply because it's created around my list. When promoting affiliate products, I get between 0.02 - 2.5% depending on the price and overall appeal of the product.