One question that came up several times was regarding “industry standards” and other types of best practices related to email marketing. People wanted to know what was a typical response rate for an email campaign? Or how often should you send out messages? How long should your newsletter be? What type of open, clickthrough, and conversation rates should you expect from your email marketing?  What was notable about these questions was that there is an impression that there are industry benchmarks that can be universally applied to all email marketers.

The beauty of email marketing is that you control it and it can be whatever you determine you want it to be. Your newsletter can be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It can be one page or ten, or anything in between. You can send it as a text message—as HTML or hopefully as both. There are many choices you can make, but in general, no hard and fast rules about what you should do.

There are no hard and fast rules because the types of companies that participate in email marketing are so varied—from international conglomerates with budgets in the tens of millions, to small, local enterprises with a very specific group of customers—it is virtually impossible to make any blanket, all-encompassing statements about what your email marketing “should” be or what you should expect.

Instead, every email campaign you send can be considered a test campaign in that you can take the results and analyze them for what you can do better or differently the next time.

Take the question of length. The optimal length for a newsletter depends on the content—how complex is it, does it require lengthy explanation—and your readers and their expectations. (As well, you should also consider how much content you have the ability to produce on a regular basis!) If your subscribers signed up for a weekly tip sheet, for example, they are not expecting anything terribly lengthy and are probably not prepared to read very much. In contrast, someone who's signed up for a monthly update on legislative decisions by congress is probably expecting and prepared to read much more complex and lengthy articles with fairly involved analysis.

Ultimately, regardless of your content or topic, you should do your best to set your readers' expectations appropriately when they sign up so that they know what to expect, making it easier for you to deliver on those expectations.

Optimal frequency will also depend on your content. Information that is tied to upcoming events or has other aspects that require timeliness may need to be published more frequently. If you are an organization like Moveon.org, you may have new content and urgent information to distribute all the time—new pending legislation or issues about to be voted on—that require frequent emails, as many as several a week. Less topical content may require only monthly publication at best. It is up to each individual company to determine the frequency that their content merits and the frequency that best serves their recipients.

Your optimum frequency also depends on your recipients’ expectations and the perceived value of your messages. Content that is fresh and relevant will be welcome more frequently than rehashed or repetitive emails. 

Open and clickthrough rates was another topic that came up a lot after our webinar. But again, response rates can differ drastically between different lists, companies, and industries, as well between B2B and B2C campaigns. Frequency of contact (how often you email subscribers) also affects these rates. Therefore, there really is no way to benchmark email marketing as a whole and provide a meaningful statistic on response rates. The best way to judge your own response rates is to do a comparison over time: are your response rates improving?

What’s important is not what everyone else is doing or what analysts say you should be doing, but what you think is best, based on your customers, your prospects, your lists – and what your experience tells you. In the end, you know your customers best!

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