Email Management & Campaigns:-

Even if your email campaigns meet goals and deliver great ROI, you probably wonder how you compare to industry standards. If so, you’re going to love the spreadsheet in a recent blog post from Mailchimp. The company analyzed 271 million emails delivered by its system on behalf of small business clients, then published industry-specific results in a host of categories: open rates, click rates, soft bounces, hard bounces, abuse complaints and unsubscribes.

* On the low end, "Beauty/Health," "Entertainment" and "Other" clients had open rates of around 15 percent.
* Conversely, "Architecture," "Church" and "Video Production" were among those topping 30 percent.

A post at the Campaign Monitor blog, meanwhile, gives rough estimates for the typical open rates achieved by various industries.

* Insurance and technology campaigns, for instance, often achieve rates in the 20 percent range.
* Those for education and real estate jump into the 30s.
* And categories about which people are especially passionate—such as non-profit, religion and art—are more likely to realize open rates of 40 percent.

"Very few lists of reasonable size are getting much above 50 percent open rates," notes Campaign Monitor. "Your list may have some specific factors that give you higher rates; if so, well done."

The Po!nt: Check out these benchmarks. Says Mailchimp, "[N]ow you have an 'apples to apples' comparison with others."

Whether customers come back and buy your product again may likely depend on whether they remember it fondly or not. So, how do you promote positive product memory? Well, research on consumers' memories for experiences (eg, listening to music, attending an event) shows that whether they remember an experience as good or bad is affected by three key aspects of that experience:

1. What the final part of the experience was like.
2. What came before it.
3. How similar its parts were.

For example, if consumers are listening to a mix of songs that are relatively similar (eg, all love songs from the same artist), they remember their experience as more positive when the songs are ordered from least- to most–liked. In other words, a positive memory is affected by whether the trend became more positive or negative.

In contrast, if they are listening to a mix of songs that are quite different from one another (say, different artists), their memory for whether the experience was good or bad is affected purely by how much they liked only the last song played.

The marketing message here? When you introduce a product, make sure the promo ends on a high note. And if the subsets of the final customer outreach are similar to each other, try to ensure that the overall experience gets increasingly better, and peaks at the end.

The Po!nt: Focus on the positive. Try ending your next promo on a sure thing—the product's highest perceived value.

Released on----- 6th November, 2008