• Bounce rate. the percentage of email addresses that did not receive the
email. a “hard bounce” means that the email was sent to an “undeliverable”
email. a “soft bounce” is when someone’s email account was temporarily
unavailable; this usually happens when a server is busy or the account is too
full. the lower the bounce rate, the better. on average, you can expect about
10% of your recipients to bounce, but this does vary across industries. Here
is a list of industry benchmarks for email statistics by mailchimp:
www. mai l chi mp. com/arti cl es/emai l _marketi ng_benchmarks_for_smal l _
business
• open rate. the percentage of recipients who have opened their email at least
once (emails sent minus bounces). there is no guarantee that people have
actually read the email, but at least they have opened it. Here is a list of the
open rate trends by mailermailer: www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/
open-rates.rwp
• unique opens rate. this measure is the “open rate” excluding duplicate opens
by the same person, and is a more realistic and reliable static.
• unsubscribe rate. the number of people who have clicked “unsubscribe”
on your email. these email addresses are automatically removed from your
mailing list by your eSP.
• click-through rate (ctr). the number of links to your website divided by the
number of opened emails. make sure that there is a good match between the
content on your email and the target market who receives it so that they are
more likely to click through to your website.