Kesous, email newsletters are tough because so many will get bounced. Folks just have too much crap coming into their inbox already. No matter what you do, a good percentage of them just won't be opened even if they don't bounce.
Does your little center have a blog? Perhaps some of what you're sending out as newsletters might be suitable as blog posts....
Innkeeper To Go said:
Kesous, email newsletters are tough because so many will get bounced. Folks just have too much crap coming into their inbox already. No matter what you do, a good percentage of them just won't be opened even if they don't bounce.
Does your little center have a blog? Perhaps some of what you're sending out as newsletters might be suitable as blog posts...
Good point on the open rate. For our biz (hotel/inn/bnb), the average
open rate is about 17-19%. I'm happy I regularly hit 25-30%. But, that does mean a fair amount of recipients do not care enough to even ask to be taken off the mailing list. I find that any email addy over 2-3 years old generally returns an opt out request within the first 2-3 newsletters. If they haven't been back in that amount of time, they're probably not coming back and they don't want the email clutter.
The
bounce rate is about 6%. The
click thru rate is about 14%. (These are industry averages based on the info returned thru the users at Constant Contact. They may not apply to all emailing services or even anyone's own personal emailing.)
When I had my 'short list' of repeat guests only, I hit 50% on the open rate.
For an email that went out today, I have an open rate of 23%, which will increase slightly over the next couple of days. But the first day is when I get the most opens, and that's typical. (There's a click rate of 35% which is WAY higher than usual as a lot of guests want to see the reno in progress. Over 50% of the people who opened the email, clicked that link to see the blog page with the reno.)
I can go months without a bounce but today I had a 1.5% bounce rate and most of them were emails I added early last year, so they have been getting the email, but maybe lost a job or changed internet providers.
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