An interesting read for those of you who utilize e-mail marketing in your affiliate marketing efforts from the folks over at MailChimp. We found this article to be pretty accurate with what we're seeing.

Our customers often ask, "What kind of open rates should companies like mine expect?" and "How many bounces are too many?" and "What’s an acceptable abuse complaint rate?"

We send more than 40 million emails a day for more than 500,000 users. We track a lot of data. So we scanned more than 570 million emails delivered by our system (where campaign tracking was activated, and where users actually reported their industry) and calculated average unique open rates, average unique click rates, average unique soft bounces, average unique hard bounces, and average unique abuse complaint rate by industry.

Best of all, these stats aren’t pulled from a survey of big giant corporations with million-dollar marketing budgets and dedicated email marketing teams. 70% of our customers have between one and ten employees, and they’re design-it-yourselfers. If you run a small organization and do your own email marketing, now you have an "apples to apples" comparison with others in your industry.
Read full article.