For my day job I work as a sales engineer for a wonderful company which produces some amazing products geared at improving performance in marketing campaigns.  We have spent many months building and continually refining our product to address the needs of our user base.  From time to time I even get pulled in and run a few marketing campaigns myself as I look to establish new prospects in my sales territory.

One thing that constantly amazes me is the general acceptance of failure when it comes to measuring marketing initiatives.  It is not a problem that solely effects our marketing efforts, most of our campaigns are very successful when compared to traditional standards.  This is a much more global problem that effects the entire marketing industry as a whole.

On average a good email marketing campaign has a 3-4% success rate.  This simply means that 3-4% of people who receive the email actually follow through with whatever the call to action might be.  So if you send an email blast to 1000 people promoting a new sale at your online, on average 30-40 people would actually buy.   These numbers are based on the fact that your campaign is pretty well put together and relevant to the audience who is receiving it.

Now take a step back and look at this situation from a different perspective.  When we were in school you had to achieve at least a grade of 70 in order to consider to pass a test or class.  A 70 was a C and was considered the baseline of success.  If you got an A or B you were considered above average.

As another example think of airline on time percentages.  Typically airlines try to stay above 85% with their on time arrivals and departures.  In my frequent traveling I often think I always find a way into that other 15% but typically people don’t.

So if in almost every other area of our lives we measure success at levels above 70%, why on Earth do we allow the definition of successful e-marketing to sit at less than 10%?  That means 90%+ of the money spent on these campaigns is thrown away.

How many things are you willing to accept a less than 10% success rate on in your life?  An even better question is, how do we fix this?