Email Response Rate
The Email Response Rate measures how many people responded to an email campaign.
Why Is Email Response Rate Important?
The main goal of any email campaign is to get into a conversation with your customer, prospect or lead. The Response Rate shows how effective your outreach was and helps improve your future campaigns, and therefore achieve a better return on investment.
Although the Email Response Rate is an important factor in measuring engagement with your contacts, it is dependent on a series of factors. For instance, campaigns, where the ICP does not match the target audience, won’t have high response rates due to the lack of interest from your recipients. Large email campaigns can have a declining response rate because of a cluttered contact list. To avoid these from occurring, make sure your ICP matches with your contact list and consistently clear it from uninterested and uninvolved contacts.
Also, the Email Response Rate relies on the body of the email – particularly on personalization and CTA (call-to-action). According to Experian, 50% of companies feel they can increase email interaction by increasing personalization. It encourages your prospects to reply, because it’s harder to ignore personal messages, and it will increase your general response rate. But a clear CTA saves your prospects from getting confused and can boost your response rate.
What Is a Good Email Response Rate?
There is no definite answer to that. Based on the information provided by Rade Kemalova, head of Internal Sales Development at CIENCE, we have gathered statistics on the average Email Response Rate across its own (that is, non-client) campaigns during the period of 2017-2019.
In the last few years, we've dramatically increased volumes of our own (non-client) campaigns, which resulted in a decrease in response rate.
Base your benchmark on your company's previous stats. Consider the industry you are in and your target audience.
Summary
The Email Response Rate is one of the most vital metrics that you can track during your email campaign. You can improve the Response Rate by segmenting your contact list and making sure your ICP is relevant to your recipients.
You should base it on your industry’s average results and your own statistics.