There is a dichotomy in the way I view statistics. They are probably the single most important aspect of email marketing, giving it its class leading return on investment, one that has been consistently high year after year. On the other hand . . .

If you were to ask me how much faith I would place in those statistics published by companies which, by dint of painstaking research, can tell us that email gives a 4200% ROI, I’d say little. Mind you, I lap it up. If I see a search return which mentions statistics, I find the urge to open it irresistible. Yet, apart from when making a decision whether or not to use email marketing for an SME start-up (yes do), they are at best of limited use.

One recent stat surprised me; nearly one in five email marketing campaigns are not optimised for mobile devices. Oddly enough, that’s reassuring. We can ignore 20% of our competitors. Another heading which draws my eyes inexorably is the one which mentions averages across the industry.

Just like everyone else, I want to see how well I am doing compared to others, and a statistic, showing the average email open rate is as much as 0.17% below mine, gives me a boost. Yet you, like everyone else, experience a downer if the click-through rate they suggest is average is just a little higher than yours. 

For each individual email marketing business, such statistics tell us very little about our own performance. The variables are too great. If the majority of businesses they obtain the stats from are nothing like ours, they probably haven’t got the same problems.

The way to judge how well your latest email marketing campaign went is by comparing it with the previous one. If your stats are higher, work out why and repeat. Do your own thing, and improve your own statistics regardless of what others say they are doing.