If you run a small business or non-profit, you might wonder how your open and click rates for email newsletters compare to similar businesses. MailChimp reveals all.

We run a number of email campaigns for our clients, from researching and writing the content, through to designing and sending the email,  and then analysing the click rates and improving and tweaking.

Open rates (how many of your subscribers actually open the email) and click rates (how many of them click on your content) are very important – but how do your campaigns compare to other businesses in the same field?

MailChimp publish handy data looking at different business sectors

MailChimp publish aggregated data, looking at more than 570,000,000 emails for 500,000 users. That’s a lot of emails. Open rates vary a fair bit – from 13.7% for politics, to 28.9% for Photo & Video (data from Dec-2010).

But it’s a useful comparison and allows you to compare your campaigns against others in the same field – especially if your open/click rates are very different. If your rates are much lower, you know you’ve got some improving to do – and if they’re much higher, you know that you’re tweaking has been paying off (or that you’re a natural).

What I really liked was their analysis of subject lines – and to how to write a good one. You can, of course, segment your subscriber list, and try out different tactics – perhaps changing the layout of your newsletter, or changing the subject line. But that’s time-consuming, and sometimes you just want to get your newsletter out of the door.

MailChimp reckon: keep it simple, describe the subject of your email, and don’t write your subject line like an advertisement. In fact, keep the subject line really boring. Something to try out next time you’re sending out a campaign…

Updates:

• 11-Apr-11: A post from Vertical Response, discussing typical email open rates. In summary, they reckon an open rate of 15% to 30% is average, and this will fluctuate depending on industry; time of day; month; email design; subject line etc.! One very useful trick we use for our clients is to send out two emails: one to all the subscribers (e.g. 10,000 recipients), and then a targeted follow-up a week later to only the subscribers who clicked or opened the first email. This sends open-rates soaring for the second email.
• 11-May-11: check out this post from Heart Internet, looking at sources of data & research. Not only do the sources consider email clients, but also industry statistics, marketing trends, and some great quotes put together by Google.