Email Marketing Open and Click Through Rate

MailerMailer stats shows that, unique email marketing gets averagely 12.5% open rate in the second half of 2008, which is 0.68% lower than first half of 2008, and 1.46% lower than year 2007.

Statistics shows that how often e-mails were opened and clicked varied with the industry of the sender—and the size of the list.

Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers.

Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies.

Here is the chart showing email open rate for most industries worldwide:

Click-through rates is even lower, for list of over 1000 subscribers, click-through rate is averagely 3.5%.

What’s your email campaign open rate and click-through rate? If you are getting similar or higher rate than what above stats shows, congratulations! Your email marketing is successful.

If not, you’d better thinking about how to improve your email open rate and click-through rate. Or most of the time, you are totally unaware of them. Then you definitely need some marketing expert to help you out. Otherwise you are losing sales everyday without noticing it!

Coupon Lovers Surge, Coupon Fraud Rise

North American (US and Canada) Internet users have responded to the economic downturn by using the Web to save money. Coupons have played a large role.

According to the “State of the US Online Retail Economy in Q1 2009” study, from comScore, online coupon services have enjoyed a huge surge in popularity during the recession. Since March 2008 year-over-year growth has been steady, and often substantial—reaching 46% in December 2008.

comScore also reported that searches for the word “coupons” were up 90% during the same period. And one-quarter of Internet users surveyed said coupon sites had been very important to them in the past three months.

Unfortunately, along with the rise in coupon usage has come a rise in coupon fraud. However the cost of coupon fraud in the tens of millions of dollars for US businesses alone.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said Bud Miller of the CIC (Coupon Information Corp.).

Of course, consumers still do most of their coupon-clipping in the physical world rather than online. Nearly one-half of respondents in the comScore study got coupons from Sunday fliers. In-store coupons and coupons printed on receipts or packaging were also popular.

About three in 10 consumers reported getting coupons either from an online service or a brand’s Website.

There is a downside to online coupons, however. The Web makes it difficult to control how coupons are printed and transferred, causing problems for some consumer manufacturers.

Nevertheless, coupons are a proven way to get consumers out to the store and into your product.

37% of people get coupon in the mail; 31% using online coupon service; 29% get coupon from merchant’s brand site.

Thinking of making digital coupons for your local business and publish them online? Email me for free consultation.

Do You Need To Push Your Business Online? Why Not!

A forecast of online e-commerce sales in US for this year and 3 years after revealed couple of days ago. I believe this forecast should be applied for North America economy including Canada. In the report:

US retail e-commerce sales (excluding travel) will total $132 billion in 2009, down 0.4% from 2008. Assuming the recession ends this year, as many economists predict, eMarketer forecasts online sales will begin to rebound in 2010 and hit full stride in 2011.

US business forecast

The Retail E-Commerce Forecast report tracks the trends that will influence online sales in the near and far future.

Web research has become a priority for value shoppers in today’s recession. Currently 86% of Internet users are online shoppers—they browse, research and compare products on the Internet, but do not necessarily buy online. As a result, though often ignored, store sales influenced by online research are three times higher than e-commerce sales.

Even so, many consumers opt to buy online for convenience, price and broad product selection. Over 80% of online shoppers are also online buyers.

Even after a decade, some online consumers still refrain from buying online due to security and privacy concerns or the inability to touch and feel products. But Web retailers are adding new content and features to overcome these hurdles.

What would you think if you have an offline business, i.e. a real estate agent, an insurance broker, a dentist, a plumber, etc. whose businesses are relying on local newspaper ads, yellow page ads, flyers, or radio and TV ads sometimes?

How would you justify the online business trends today and future? Even though some of  you may have set up a website and trying to push your business online, did you really get new customers through your website?

Get an online marketing package tailored for your local business today!