Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

The answer is: it depends. Each offer, each mailing, from each company will be different. If you really want to know what the response is for your product/offer/company/offer, you'll have to test it.

The DMA puts out a yearly report on Response Rate trends. You can get it on their site (https://www.the-dma.org) but it costs $470.

I did find an article summarizing the findings here:

https://tinyurl.com/response-study

A summary of the DMA findings could be paraphrased thus, “As your question didn’t look very interesting or offer very many points I never read it and thus cannot be of assistance”

It’s only because I am a member of this forum that I did. The old rules of opening remain – does it look personal or just personalised, does it look interesting and relevant or run of the mill, what does it appear to be about and is there in incentive for opening it?

Then depending on the industry sector you target, whether it is B2C or B2B and so on your opening rate would be between 3 and 30%

More important is the response rate which is better defined and the only figure that matters in the end. A 90% opening rate is a fat lot of use if 0% of the openers binned your mailing. If on the other hand you are trying to tease out the opening rate so that you can see how effective your offer or how effective your copy happens to be, that is noble, but you might be trying to do too many things at the same time.

The DMA maxim that theirs was a simple business because it was measurable in its effectiveness in the short term is still true. Whether you can justify taking the plunge on a campaign depends on your own level of confidence, not on someone else’s statistics.

If in doubt, try a small mailing. If it pays for itself, double it. If that pays for itself double it again. Stop doing it if you lose money – its not working or you’ve saturated the market! If you make money, then do more than double your efforts. If you can spare the time, survey the recipients as to why they like what they are getting. If it works don’t try to mend it. If it doesn’t work, don’t double your losses until you know why? Small mailings do not yield accurate statistics. Large mailings put all the risk up front but tell you accurately how well they work. If it fails, you won’t know which bit of the process was the weak link unless you survey.

Right, that’s definitely more than 25 points worth so can I have my free offer now please?



Steve Alker
Xspirt

Dear randi,

For plain envelopes, open rates are generally 2 to 3 percent.
For envelopes that stand out, possibly as high as 10 percent.

However, it's not the packaging, it's the segmentation of the list,
AND it's the relevance of the mailing TO to the recipient at the time
of delivery, AND, what's on the envelope in terms of personalization, making the envelope stand out, and so on.

Here, handwritten addressing (or a handwritten looking font), live stamps (that are a tad lopsided), some kind of compelling headline or teaser text on the outside of the envelope that urges action on opening NOW (deadlines are great on this front), these things can all add urgency, and where there's urgency, or the possibility of losing out, there is attention.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA