Whether you’re in the process of defining and executing a formal nurturing program or simply leveraging email to blast out product or service information to a targeted audience, it’s important that expectations are set in regards to what is typical when it comes to response rates on these types of campaigns. Many people go into nurturing without realizing it is a relationship tool, but the nature of the relationship requires time, which affects metrics quite dramatically. To help define expectations, I’ve pulled some industry data from a recent Harte-Hanks report that will help set clear expectations when it comes to the three key metrics of email marketing: Delivery Rates, Open Rates and Click Through Rates (CTR).

Delivery Rates

According to the Harte-Hanks report, most industry sectors are averaging a 95-98% delivery success rate. We’ve learned, of course, that your success rate is only as good as the quality of the list you’re targeting. Lists derived from client data or through your own demand generation efforts will always tend to be more accurate than a purchased list. You also need to realize that lists are like fresh preserves: They don’t keep forever. It’s best to have an immediate action plan when it comes to communicating with any list – purchased or otherwise.

Open Rates

Open rates for 2010 were at a 17% average. Down significantly from 2009′s average of 26%. Combine the amount of unsolicited email received daily with the increase in LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media messages filtered through email and it’s a wonder anything get’s opened anymore. There are a couple key factors often overlooked when assessing and obtaining good open rates:

1) With our inboxes more cluttered than ever before, the quality of the subject line has become ever critical to campaign success. Those four to five words may be the only chance you have to capture mindshare. Don’t take that message for granted.

2) The only way to track an actual open is if the email client can detect that HTML images were downloaded. Since many operating systems (especially on mobile devices) require this as an extra step, many people don’t take the time to download images or are hesitant due to security or bandwidth issues. This alone will make open rates appear lower than the actual number of eyes reading your email.

3) Unsolicited emails sent from a generic mailbox or from an unknown source are generally viewed as suspicious and so no action is taken. We recently completed a campaign where we sent automated emails on behalf of a field marketing team. Each email was personalized and appeared to come from the actual mailbox of the person with whom the contact already had a good working relationship. In this case, we saw open rates nearly double the average, and better yet, click through rates were nearly triple the national average.

If you are planning to send unsolicited B2B emails, be prepared for very low open rates initially and realize it may take three to four communications with very targeted, low-pressure and informative content before you see any sort of action taken by the prospect.

Click Through Rates

When all is said and done, this is probably the most important measure of a campaign’s success. According to the Harte Hanks study, anything above the average of 3% CTR should be considered a success. It’s vital not to become discouraged by what could be perceived as a very small CTR percentage; it’s why we appropriately call it nurturing. Not everyone is ready to buy at exactly the same time. The idea isn’t to get the prospect to take action – unless they are ready to have a sales-ready conversation. When done properly, nurturing doesn’t change the CTR percentage dramatically, but it does change the quality and relevance of those leads who do take action. Ask any salesperson if they would rather have 10 warm leads or three sales-ready leads, and you know which one they’ll choose.

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