Email Response Rate (Metric)

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What Is Email Response Rate?

Email response rate is an email marketing metric that measures the percentage of emails sent that get a response. It is easy to benchmark email marketing campaigns using response rate.

Why Is Response Rate Useful?

It is one of the metrics email marketers measure. It is particularly a key metric for email outreach campaigns. 

You can tell how your email outreach campaign is doing by taking a look at your reply rate.

How to Calculate Email Response Rate

You can calculate your email response rate with this simple formula: 

Response rate (%) = (Number of respondents / Total number of emails sent) * 100

There are some email marketing campaign software that will calculate this for you so you don't have to worry about doing it manually.

What Is a Good Response Rate?

There’s no one size fits all for a good response rate. A lot of factors go into this. 

The type of email you are sending as well as the industry you’re in are some of the variables to consider when thinking about this question.

Other factors are things like the target audience, your offer, and the type of email list you’re using. 

For example, an email list you’ve built over time through a newsletter subscription on your blog are more likely to respond to you than an email list you bought from a vendor.

To sum this up, the answer to this question is that it varies. Most email marketers, however believe that a response rate of around 8-10% is good

Does Response Rate Matter?

The short answer is yes, response rate matters. Your email response rate can tell you a lot about your subscribers. 

Are they loyal? 

Are they engaged?

Are they annoyed?

These are a few of the questions you can answer by looking at your reply rates.

As mentioned earlier, it can also help bloggers, marketers, and sales people sending outreach emails to determine how their campaigns are doing and whether they need to make any changes. 

Finally, your response rate can serve as one of the guiding factors in developing a long-term email marketing strategy that generates a positive ROI.

Overall, response rate is an important email marketing metric. 

How Can You Improve Your Response Rate?

There are a couple of things you can do to improve the number of people who respond to your email campaigns.

The first thing is to improve your open rates. Getting more people to open your email will most likely lead to more people responding to your emails. 

The next thing is to divide your email list into segments. Do not send the same email to everyone on your list. Segmenting your list allows you to better personalise them and people are more likely to respond to an email if it feels personal rather than one that sounds salesy.

Lastly, ask your recipients for a response. Including a message like “I’d love to hear your thoughts on this” at the end of your email is enough to push people to respond.

How Can We Help?

Does your email marketing strategy need amping up? Contact us for a free strategy session where we can give you some personalised pointers.

In the meantime, you should check out our training courses to access essential lessons in marketing.