How to Benchmark Email Open Rates to Drive Event Attendance

By Jenny Hamby, the Seminar Marketing Pro™
Certified Guerrilla Marketer and Direct-Response Copywriter

When marketing your own seminars, workshops and webinars, one of the greatest sources of frustration and confusion is wondering how your list and campaigns are performing.

Comparing your results to industry averages is one way to gauge performance. What’s more important, though, is benchmarking your list’s current performance against past results.

For example, let’s say your open rate is 30 percent and the industry average is 25 percent. You’re doing great, right? Maybe … maybe not. Compared with the industry average, absolutely. But if your open rate has traditionally been 40 percent, performance is suffering and it’s time to figure out why.

We know a high-performing list can do wonders to drive event attendance, but increasing its effectiveness requires careful analysis. To take the guesswork out of your list’s performance, let’s look at 4 steps to implementing a benchmark system that will help you improve upon your own numbers over time and allow you to fill more seats at your workshops, seminars, and webinars.

1. Know Your Industry

To begin analyzing how your list is doing, you should first understand your industry’s average numbers to help get a sense of how you’re performing.

Mailchimp.com’s “Email Marketing Benchmarks” lists open rates, click rates, soft bounces, hard bounces, abuse rates, and unsubscribe rates for more than 40 industries. While the overall average open rate for all industries is 20.81 percent, there is a good deal of variation between different industries. Real estate emails, for instance, have a high open rate and a low click through rate, while the inverse is true for media & publishing-related emails.

Once you know which industry you are working in, get all the information you can about average performances. Now, note your own list’s current numbers. This will help you put your own initial performance into context before you begin taking steps to improve it.

2. Begin Tracking Changes

Now that you have an initial benchmark to work from, the obvious next step is to try to improve upon it. The key to this step is careful experimentation. Be on the lookout for any changes in performance over time. If your open rate begins to drop, ask yourself why. Are your subject lines at fault? Or perhaps your deliverability? You should also consider whether you are sending emails too frequently, as this can cause some members of your list to ignore your messages more often. Likewise, if you notice a spike in open rates or click-through rates, dive into the email content to spot what sparked the change. Was the subject line unique in structure or topic? What benefit or pain point did you hit in the message. Every stage of the marketing process provides some type of opportunity. A 0.1 percent improvement at each step will result in significant changes over time. The more you note how changes in your email content affect your list’s performance, the more material you will have to work from when improving your numbers.

3. Refine Your Content

Perhaps the biggest determining factor in your emails’ performance is the quality of their content. Great emails will stand out from the countless other messages your prospects are most likely receiving. This begins with a well-chosen subject line.

A purely informative subject line that states what is inside your email can help you stand out from the crowd. However, this shouldn’t stop you from experimenting with different subject line types. “Teaser” subject lines can be very effective when used infrequently, as can “call to action” subject lines related to deadlines. Relying too much on one type of subject line can invite predictability and might annoy your list, so use a variety to keep things interesting.

Finally, always remember to include your company name in your “from” field. This will help your list recognize you and avoid categorizing your email as spam.

4. Note Your Performance at Regular Intervals

While experimenting with different techniques and email content, track your results over time. Small refinements can add up to big change. If you invest the time to track how much improvement occurs after each tiny tweak, you’ll get a much better idea of how your efforts are paying off. Plus, you’ll be able to identify which refinements created the biggest boosts in results — and then do more of the same.

Write down your numbers on at least a monthly basis to compare results over time.

Be Strategic to Improve Open Rates and Fill Event Seats

Savvy event promoters don’t like leaving things to chance. Increasing open rates and click through rates requires strategy and monitoring of performance. With these steps in mind, you’ll be ready to take your list’s performance to a new high, translating into more event seats filled at your next workshop, seminar, or webinar.