Do you ever wonder if your email marketing efforts are really working? Sure, you can compare your open rates and click-through rates internally, but it can help to look at industry-wide benchmarks to truly gauge the success of your email marketing. We’ll discuss how to benchmark your email marketing and why it matters.
3 Reasons to Benchmark Your Email Marketing
Before we discuss the metrics to look for and resources to use to benchmark your organization’s email marketing, let’s go over three reasons why it’s important to benchmark.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses in your email marketing strategy to send better emails.
- It provides an unbiased perspective and allows you to optimize your emails based on cold, hard data instead of what you think might work.
- Allows you to set SMART goals that are attainable because you will know how industry typically performs in email marketing.
4 Email Marketing Metrics That Matter
There are many metrics you can pull from your email marketing, but here are the ones you want to keep an eye on:
A good open rate indicates that your subscribers are interested in reading your message and shows that your subject lines are captivating.
A high click-through rate shows that you sent relevant content to a list and that they want to further engage with your content.
Your conversion rate will tell you how effective your email marketing efforts are and if you are sending the right content to the right people.
Your bounce rate can inform you if there is something wrong with the email address you are trying to send emails to. Check to see if you made a typo, and if not, remove the email address from your contacts so that it doesn’t impact your deliverability negatively.
For a detailed explanation on how these metrics are calculated, read our blog post: Understanding Email Marketing Analytics and Benchmarks
How to Benchmark Your Industry’s Email Marketing
Now that you know why benchmarking is important and the metrics to look for, it’s time to look at what how your industry’s emails perform on average. Here are email marketing statistics from a few of the larger email platforms that break things down by industry:
This resource breaks down average open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and more for 40+ industries. A variety of different-sized companies are represented in the data, which makes it a great resource to compare your industry’s email marketing efforts.
This list just contains open rates broken down by industry, but it’s data that is pulled from over 25 million emails! Overall, their results show that the average open rate across all the industries is 37%, but be sure to click-through to find your specific industry.
Like the other lists, this list examines email marketing metrics by industry. However, the open rates are split into more specific categories: desktop open rate and mobile/tablet open rate. This is important information because it can provide you more insight into your target persona and how they engage with your content.
What’s Next?
So now that you have compared your email marketing metrics, you may have spotted some room for improvement. You should A/B test your emails to find out what yields better results with your subscribers. When creating variations of your emails, be sure to only change one factor at a time. This way you’ll know exactly what improved your metrics, i.e., an emoji in the subject line, a different color CTA, etc.
Need help on optimizing your emails to improve a specific metric? Read our blog post, Tips to Boost the Success of Your Email Marketing.
Improve your email marketing strategy by measuring your efforts against your industry. This way, you’re ensuring that your organization is sending the best emails and hitting attainable results. If you are stuck and can't meet or exceed your industry's benchmarks, then schedule a time for us to talk about how we can help!
