One of the most frequent questions we get is "What kind of response rate will I get to my email marketing campaign"

Any specific answer we could give would be wrong before we even utter it - why? Because the response rate YOU
will receive will depend on many factors uniques to you including:

• How your brand is perceived in the marketplace
• How hard your offer is - are you selling an item for $10,000 without a trial or introductory offer
• Seasonality
• List characteristics - are you sending to your highest value customers or 3 year old inquirers

After I explain that then I give my rule of thumb of what we've observed:

Open Rates - most fall within the range of 13-28%

Click-Through Rates - most fall within the range of 1/2% to 5%

Conversion rates (what percent of clicks lead to the holy grail of sales) - most fall between 2-20%

We base this on our experience plus metrics found by Internet Retailer in a survey in 2007. Here is what they've found:

24.2% of web merchants have an email open rate greater than 25%;
2.8% have open rates of 19.1% to 25%;
13.5% have open rates of between 15.1% and 19%;
17.4% have open rates of from 5.1% to 15%;
11.4% have open rates of between 1% and 5%;
20.8% don't know or say their open rate is less than 1%. - Internet Retailer (2007)

These below are calculated as the percentage of OPENS not percentage of DELIVERED

17.1% reported email click-through rates of 15.1% or more;
51.8% report click-through rates of 2.51% to 15%;
10.3% report click-through rates fewer than 2.5%;
20.8% that don't know their click-through rates. - Internet Retailer (2007)