What is a typical response rate for an email campaign? How often should you send out messages? Or how long should your newsletter be? Andrew Robinson, managing director of the email marketing company Lyris Technologies, discusses the 'industry benchmark' - and whether the digital marketing industry should seek to set them.

One question issue that we are often asked regards the issue of 'industry standards', and other types of best practices related to email marketing. People want to know what is a typical response rate for an email campaign? Or how often should you send out messages? How long should your newsletter be? What type of open, clickthrough, and conversation rates should you expect from your email marketing? What was notable about these questions was that there is an impression that there are industry benchmarks that can be universally applied to email marketers.

You are in control
The beauty of email marketing is that you control it and it can be whatever you determine it to be. Your newsletter can be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It can be one page or ten, or anything in between. You can send it as text, HTML or hopefully both. There are many choices you can make, but in general, no hard and fast rules about what you should do.

There are no hard and fast rules. The types of companies that participate in email marketing are so varied—from international conglomerates with budgets in the tens of millions, to small, local enterprises with a very specific group of customers—it is virtually impossible to make any blanket, all-encompassing statements about what your email marketing should be, or what you would expect.

Instead, every email campaign you send can be considered a test campaign - in that you can take the results and analyse them for what you can do better or differently the next time.

Length
Take the question of length (once you have considered consider how much content you have the ability to produce on a regular basis). The optimal length for a newsletter depends on the content, your readers and their expectations. If your subscribers signed up for a weekly tip sheet, for example, they are not expecting anything terribly lengthy and are probably not prepared to read very much. In contrast, someone who's signed up for a monthly update on legislative decisions by congress is probably expecting and prepared to read much more complex and lengthy articles with fairly involved analysis.

Ultimately, regardless of your content or topic, you should do your best to set your readers' expectations appropriately when they sign up so that they know what to expect, making it easier for you to deliver on those expectations.

Frequency
Optimal frequency will also depend on your content. Information that is tied to upcoming events or has other aspects that require timeliness may need to be published more frequently. If you are a governmental organisation for example, you may have new content and urgent information to distribute all the time—new pending legislation or issues about to be voted on—that require frequent emails, as many as several a week. Less topical content may require only monthly publication at best. It is up to each individual company to determine the frequency that their content merits and the frequency that best serves their recipients.

Your optimum frequency also depends on your recipients’ expectations and the perceived value of your messages. Content that is fresh and relevant will be welcome more frequently than rehashed or repetitive emails.

Click-through rates
Open and clickthrough rates are another topic that came up frequently. But again, response rates can differ drastically between different lists, companies, and industries, as well as if it’s a B2B versus a B2C campaign. Frequency of contact (how often you email subscribers) also affects these rates. Therefore, there really is no way to benchmark email marketing as a whole and provide a meaningful statistic on response rates. The best way to judge your own response rates is to do a comparison over time: are your response rates improving?

You know your customers best
What’s important is not what everyone else is doing or what analysts say you should be doing, but what you think is best, based on your customers, your prospects, your lists – and what your experience tells you. In the end, you know your customers best.

About the author
Andrew Robinson is managing director of the email marketing company Lyris Technologies