Newsletter Statistics for Best Open, Click-Thru and Delivery Rates.
Case Studies - Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) - August 15th, 2005 - PermalinkAre your newsletters generating the results you wish they were?
Missing just a few simple steps in the creation and sending process can have a significant impact upon overall response. Many AWeber customers utilize the extensive opt-in newsletter delivery tools to send periodic updates to subscribers who have requested that type of information.
Many businesses rely on statistics and real world results to drive business critical decisions. To aid customers in making important decisions about their newsletter delivery we have gathered summary results from thousands of AWeber customer newsletters over the past 30 days to help share what works and what doesn’t.
AWeber Delivery Results:
12,561 subscribers in an average customer opt-in newsletter list.
4 minutes and 24 seconds is the average amount of time between when a customer queues a newsletter and when AWeber completes delivery.
94% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 5 minutes of when they are scheduled.
98.4% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 30 minutes of when they are scheduled.
99.34% of all email was delivered successfully in the last 30 days.
0.66% of all email was undeliverable in the last 30 days. (mailbox closed, non-existent user, etc.)
Open Rates:
Average open rate of HTML and Text/HTML newsletters is 29.7% over the past 30 days.
Sunday generates the highest average open rate of 41.1%, followed by Saturday at 36.7% for newsletter sent date.
- Average Open Rate by Sent Date: (higher is better)
| Sunday | 41.1% |
| Saturday | 36.7% |
| Wednesday | 34.0% |
| Friday | 32.8% |
| Tuesday | 29.6% |
| Thursday | 24.6% |
| Monday | 23.2% |
Sunday generates the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.36% for newsletters sent on that date.
- Average Undeliverable Rate by Sent Date: (lower is better)
| Sunday | 0.36% |
| Saturday | 0.45% |
| Friday | 0.47% |
| Thursday | 0.56% |
| Wednesday | 0.77% |
| Tuesday | 0.83% |
| Monday | 0.88% |
Monday is the most popular day of the week for customers to send their newsletters with 17.1% of newsletters being sent.
- Percent of newsletters being sent by customers weekly:
| Monday | 17.1% |
| Tuesday | 17.0% |
| Thursday | 16.2% |
| Wednesday | 15.8% |
| Friday | 14.5% |
| Saturday | 10.3% |
| Sunday | 9.0% |
An 8:00 AM EST send time generates the highest open rate of 50.6%. Interestingly sending at 9:00 AM EST has a significantly lower open rate of 33.7% with the worst time to send being 3-4 AM at only 19% open rate.
Plain text messages are the most popular format of sending newsletters with 65.9% of all newsletters sent. Mime format Text/HTML messages follow at 23.8% and a remaining 10.2% of customers still send HTML only messages even though it is strongly recommended to always include a plain text version.
Plain text messages generate the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.46%. Mime format Text/HTML follows at 0.56% and HTML only messages have a whopping 1.09% undeliverable rate. This is a significant reason behind our recommendation to always send a plain text alternative with HTML formatted messages.
Subject line personalization using the date generated an average open rate of 51.4% compared to personalization using the subscriber’s first name generating 40.9% open rate. Newsletters sent without personalization of any type in the subject line generated average open rates of 28.9%.
17% of customer newsletter subject lines sent in the last 30 days contained date personalization while 19% used the subscriber’s first name. 56.3% of subject lines did not contain any type of personalization. Interestingly, using the subscriber’s full name or last name generated lower average open rates at 20%.
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