Open Rates By List Size
Email Marketing - Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) - July 20th, 2006 - PermalinkEver wish you could see how your open rates compare with other publishers who have similar sized lists?
Most studies I’ve come across list open rates cumulatively regardless of the size of the subscriber base. Unfortunately that doesn’t account for the huge difference in open rates for lists of different sizes.
The data above was gathered from thousands of AWeber small business clients sending text/html format messages over the course of 2.5 years and 105,922 campaigns. You can see that the smaller the list the more tuned in the subscriber base is to the message. Over time as the opt-in subscriber base grows it gets harder to harder to achieve high open rates.
Why are open rates different based on list size?
- Subscriber Age: Smaller lists tend to be newer subscribers. If you’re a new subscriber you’re more likely to be open a message because you’re more recently expressed an interest in the topic you subscribed to.
- Content Focus: The bigger the list the more of a mass market you must appeal to. When you have a small list the content of a newsletter tends to be laser focused on exactly what they want.
- Relationships: List owners tend to nurture and build lasting relationships with their subscribers more when they have fewer of them. As a list grows many businesses lose focus that each email is being read by a single person and not 50,000 people in a stadium listening over a loud speaker.
The graph above details open rates for all AWeber clients regardless of list size. Even with the increase of image blocking over the years open rates have remained fairly steady. I could argue that the increase of image blocking actually indicates that open rates have increased over the years, although hard numbers on how much of an impact it has are nearly impossible to calculate.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
July 24th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Glad to see you’ve opened a blog! I bet you have all kinds of tips & tricks to help your users.
We’d be interested in tips on growing your newsletter list size.
Additionally, people could probably use more clarity on how the follow-up system works.
Thanks
July 24th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Welcome to the wonderful world of blogs. I’d love to see any info you might have on html vs. plain text messages (opens, clicks, conversions, etc.). Any and all best practices you can share are much appreciated.
We’ve just started using AWeber, and have only scratched the surface of the capabilities as they relate to our small community theatre. The features and the price are amazing.
July 25th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
This information is invaluable as a benchmark to see if my campaigns are performing as well as or way worse than others. It tells me if I should work harder on one aspect or another.
Keep ‘em coming!
July 25th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Thanks Tom. List building is important and any tips on increasing quantity and quality of our subscribers would be appreciated.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Congratulations on starting your blog, Tom.
I have seen ESPs who are pitching bloggers, but still they don’t have a blog to communicate their value to their prospects and/or customers.
We would like to see more of such data. I know they vary, depends on the list but industry specific numbers might help more in determining if what we do agrees with the overall industry average.
Again thanks for your information. Added your RSS feed to my feed reader!
July 25th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Fantastic! I found your system recommended in an e-book on using email to follow up with prospects. Your “trial” email copy was also featured as a great sample of how to write effective messages. As a copywriter myself, I’d love to see blog postings on content that you’ve seen perform well…
July 25th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Excellent benchmark data on email marketing. The insights into the age of the list and the declining open rates is great common sense insights that we have overlooked.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
We definitely have much more content coming on list building, getting
and keeping quality subscribers, other statistics, etc. A number of the team here at AWeber will be posting and I’ll introduce each before they do. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people imagine.
Please note that blog comments are not intended for general account support questions, please address those to our excellent customer service team.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Your comment “…many businesses lose focus that each email is being read by a single person and not 50,000 people in a stadium listening over a loud speaker.”
Is very important. I am the recipient of many emails from other mailing list and notice that immediately. Even though my name is at the top of the email I can see that the list has lost its intimacy and therefore its audience.
My advice is to imagine that you are writing an email to just one person and are giving them straight, honest, impartial advice (or whatever you write about) and don’t abstract them into a “sea of masses”
July 25th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Tom,
Great to see the blog launch, am seriously looking forward to the juicy snippets being posted that I envisage will be posted to help me build my business.
July 25th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Tom,
Two things:
1) Congrats on starting your blog - I’ll be an avid reader. AWEBER has been and will be the way that I communicate with my readers….
2) I’m SO HAPPY that you included the historical open rates. Since I didn’t have a benchmark, I’ve thought that mine were low - come to find out - they’re JUST FINE…..
July 25th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Yipee! Glad to see the blog. aweber has done nothing but improve over the years I have been using it.
The blog to email service is invaluable for me. And you did it with templates, too!
I no longer publish a “newsletter” but just send out blog posts. My customers love that they can comment and interact. My business has more than doubled since changing over to a blog from a website + newsletter.
Thanks for staying on the cutting edge.
July 25th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Tom,
I gotta tell you my friend that I look at Aweber as one of the best investments I’ve ever made since going online with my copywriting business!
I’ve tried many autoresponder services and have “never” seen the high quality, multitude of features, and superior customer service that you have given me with your Aweber business.
– You go the extra mile in every aspect of your business!
Sorry if this sounded too much like a testimonial, but I wouldn’t slept well tonight if I hadn’t gotten this off my chest!
July 26th, 2006 at 12:49 am
My open rates where getting just a little slower. My list is in the 1 to 1000. It is good to compare my performance to others. It is very encouraging.
Thanks Aweber and Tom.
July 26th, 2006 at 1:00 am
I’ve asked support before if they’ve had statistics about verification rates, open rates, and other stats to no luck.
These stats are exactly what I’m after. I’ll be a regular reader of the blog.
July 26th, 2006 at 4:29 am
There seems to be something weird with your “average open rates” :
- open rates seems to be incredibly high
- open rate evolution is not in line with what similar companies are publishing ( most companies report a steady decline of open rates )
July 26th, 2006 at 4:36 am
Thanks Tom for a great blog. This information is of great interest and like others look forward to seeing more data and statistics that will help me get the greatest value out of my lists.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Glad to see the blog!
I’d love to see some articles around how to best leverage Aweber. I know there are lots of features I am not even using. Perhaps an autoresponder/relationship building using Aweber for Newbies (or Dummies, or whatever…but keeping it simple and accessible for people newer to using these tools. I am solid from a technical standpoint, but newer to the marketing aspect).
Looking forward to reading your regular posts!
July 26th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Ezel,
You might think the data looks weird, but I can assure you that’s
the real data across thousands of customers, tens of thousands of
campaigns and several hundred million individual recipients. I
wasn’t a statistics major in college, but I’m pretty sure that’s
a statistically relevant sample size.
Every ESP is going to have a different base set of customers.
We’re very strict about the type of customers that we work with
and require an extremely high standard of opt-in list quality.
All of which factors into overall email deliverability and open
rates in the long run. Many of our customers are also very
small businesses that tend to have a closer bond with their
subscriber base than more corporate oriented customers.
August 2nd, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Thanks Tom,
This information is extremely interesting and helpful as I’ve been searching for average open rates of ezines. My average open rate for my regular monthly ezine is 128% and I’ve been wondering how that compared to others. Now I know! Granted, my list size is an ‘intimate’ number, but perhaps, smaller IS better…in this case.
Now I’m curious to see stats on how open rates relate to sales. Hmm.
August 3rd, 2006 at 2:05 am
Hi Tom
we’re just writing a book which includes a section on opt-in lists (and recommends aweber of course!) - I’d love to include your graph and some of your comments and put (yet another) a link to aweber in there - is that possible?
Debs
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:01 am
Certainly Debs!
September 12th, 2006 at 3:23 am
The term ESP is being used in some of the comments here. Can someone let us know what ESP stands for?rnrnThanks!
September 12th, 2006 at 7:33 am
ESP = Email Service Provider
January 8th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Excellent benchmark data on email marketing. The insights into the age of the list and the declining open rates is great common sense insights that we have overlooked.
January 13th, 2007 at 7:17 am
thanks
October 19th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Never been a blogger before, a lot of imfo., glad to get my feet wet!