Benchmark your email marketing against these 2014 totals.
Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” In fairness, he wasn’t an email marketer. It’s true that your best comparisons are to your own best-performing campaigns, no matter the medium. There is a bit of joy, though, when you know how well your campaigns perform against all the other smart marketing campaigns out there.
The trick is finding reliable standards to measure yourself against. My company recently aggregated the results of the hundreds of clients who used our platform last year, to find typical open rates, click-through rates and other metrics. The report not only came
up with averages for these metrics, it also uncovered patterns that could help you find a good benchmark for
your company.
Open Rates
One of the most common questions from eager email marketers is “What’s a good open rate?”
Typically, average open rates are between 20 and 25 percent, though it could be higher or lower depending on whether your emails are good or bad, your list is old or new, and a hundred other factors.
It can also make a difference what industry you’re in and how big your total list size is. For example, the banking sector averaged almost a 30 percent open rate, and entertainment was just over 28 percent on average. Government-related business averaged a little higher than 27 percent, beating out the broad average, too.
Click-Throughs Vs. Click-to-Open
Click-through rates—the percentage of people who click on a link inside an email—tend to be between 3 and 5 percent, but the agriculture (8.2 percent) and retail (7.3 percent) industries almost doubled the broader average.
More pertinent than raw click-through rate is your click-to-open ratio, meaning of those who opened your email, how many clicked through to your website or offer landing page? Your click-through rate can be a tough judge, since it relies heavily on your open rate. Instead, watching your click-to-open rate (CTOR) can help determine the real effectiveness of your email.
On average, CTOR is between 12 and 15 percent. In 2014, agriculture (21.8 percent), advertising and marketing (18.9 percent) and retail (18.1 percent) all significantly outperformed that average.
Bounces, Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints
Average bounce rates were around 1.5 percent. Best practices recommend keeping your bounce rate below 5 percent regularly. Otherwise, you’ve got a list problem and need to clean house.
Average unsubscribe rate was an impressive 0.22 percent, well under the “safe zone” of 1 percent, and spam complaint rates were 0.03 percent, also well clear of the recommended less than 0.1 percent. The open rate tended to be lower on average as the list size grew, probably due to the age of the list and wide spread of interest level with an audience over 300,000 contacts, for example. Even then, average open rate was still just under 22 percent, and click-through rate was 3.6 percent. There wasn’t much difference at all between business-to-business and business-to-consumer email benchmarks.
The biggest difference was between emails sent in large batches at scheduled times and automated or “triggered” emails. Automated emails that go out when it’s most relevant to the recipient, usually used for nurturing leads or upselling, boast closer to a 50 percent open rate on average.
The most common automated email, of course, is the ”welcome” email sent after someone signs up for a list, usually earning over a 50 percent open rate when sent
immediately. Click-through rate on automated emails also doubled that of batched, reaching as high as 17.5 percent in some cases.
To see the whole emfluence report on 2014 Email Marketing Benchmarks, visit www.emarketingplatform.com/blog.
