One of the most important keys to implementing a successful outbound email campaign is knowing which metrics to track, so that you can quickly evaluate the performance of your campaigns and flag opportunities for improvement based on previously establish benchmarks.
But if you’re implementing an outbound email campaign for the first time or for a new industry, you might not have any benchmarks to compare your campaign’s performance against.
Here are 6 outbound email metrics we recommend tracking, along with some benchmark conversion rates for each metric:
1. Open Rates
Typically, when we send out an email campaign, we want to see anywhere between a 20 to 40% open rate. Anything less than a 15% open rate means there is something wrong with either the system that you’re using, the platform, or the list.
Definitely, you want to be 15% or higher open rates. If you have a good list, with an attractive offer, and lots of domain reputation, you can get as high as a 60% open rate.
We recommend that you strive for anywhere between a 20 to 40% open rate.
2. Reply Rates
This refers to the reply rate on contacts engaged, not on deliveries or email sent. That’s an important distinction. The industry average for reply rates is 2%.
With that in mind, we use a number of different personalization variables. Over the years, we have developed 15 different personalization variables. We are happy to share those with you.
When we use our personalization variables effectively coupled with well crafted, personalized, and specific campaigns, we can see anywhere from a 6 to 8% reply rate.
We have seen campaigns that have had much higher reply rates. But if you’re sitting around a 6 to 8% reply rate, that is a sign that you are doing really good.
3. Interest Rates
Interest rates are the percentage of the people that reply to your message and express interest in what you have to offer. This is very typical of getting through to somebody you know on the phone and having a conversation with them. What you’ll typically find is that about 20% of the time, they have some level of interest in what you have to offer.
In our case, if we have a 20% reply rate, a 15 to 20% interest rate shows that we are doing pretty good. So a 15 to 20% interest rate is a good place to be.
4. Qualification Rates
This is the percentage of the meeting that when booked gets attended. Typically, we see a qualification rate of around 80 to 90%. At other times, it is as low as 60 or 70. It depends on the industry.
5. Conversion Rates
This refers to the percentage of a meeting that gets qualified and gets a proposal. We see anywhere between 25 to 50% of those qualified meetings will actually go to a proposal.
6. Win Rates
This is the number of sales opportunities that are created and moved to a closed one. Out of those proposals, 50% will move to a closed one. So on average, we are seeing about a 15% win rate.
Want some help to fill your pipeline with qualified sales opportunities? Schedule a free Sales Strategy call to have us map out a growth plan that is customized to your business and revenue goals.