They say the larger the list of email addresses, the more powerful your marketing will be. But whether your list is 1000, 5,000, or 50,000… you need to consider your actual open rates, how many of your emails are actually being opened and read. With an HTML ezine, you can monitor this percentage.
Here’s a recent post from Rick Brooks of www.flyteblog.com about an open rate survey conducted by Constant Contact, a leading email provider.
According to an article at Constant Contact called "Understanding Open Rates: How Open Rates Are Measured and Tips for Increasing Yours," B2C (business to consumer) emails get opened 30% – 39% of the time, while B2B emails are opened a paltry 10% – 29%.
There are also some tips in how to increase your open rates, but nothing ground breaking. Improve your subject lines, make sure your "from" line is recognizable, try testing different sending times, send more targeted emails and evaluate how often you send.
I will add that you should also be sure that the email system you use to sent out your ezine is reputable and uses permission based, opt-in standards. Kick Start Cart will not let you import a list of subscribers without asking each one to confirm their subscription, for example. This helps ensure they will not get on any blacklists for spam complaints.
How are your open rates? I usually see 25% to 40% open rates with my newsletter clients. It has more to do with the quality of the list than the quality of the actual writing or newsletter, from what I can tell. Those people who have actively recruited people into their lists have higher numbers, but lower open rates. Perhaps they were going after numbers rather than ideal readers.
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