Email is a core marketing channel for brands of all shapes and sizes in nearly every industry and vertical. Its performance can have a huge impact on a brand’s overall marketing success and organizational growth. This is key because email marketing still performs well and brings in major ROI results for brands.
Additionally, owning your data and connecting with customers where they already are (in their inboxes) can be significant factors for measuring your marketing methods’ progress. Understanding your industry’s email marketing benchmarks defines the baseline for success.
The overall industry averages
If your scores are above the overall or industry-specific benchmark averages then you have a strong foundation to build on. However, it’s important to know that you can still achieve incremental improvements and, sometimes, major leaps of improvement with some adjustments. If your data scores are a little low then it indicates you have a lot of room to improve your strategy and see some big gains.
The overall email benchmark averages for all industries are:
- Average open rate: 20.45%
- Average click-through rate: 2.45%
- Average bounce rate: 0.40%
- Average unsubscribe rate: 0.16%
Reference: This data is sourced using recent benchmark studies from Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and GetResponse.
Related: Use our email marketing benchmark tool to see the scores for your industry.
The top-performing industries
When looking at the top-performing industries in email marketing, it’s crucial to remember who the unique audiences are. For instance, someone receiving an email from an educational institute, such as their kid’s school, is naturally more inclined to open and interact with those emails.
Some of the top-performing industries in email marketing are:
- Education
- Government
- Nonprofit
The best days for sending emails
After reviewing the reported data, it revealed that Tuesday and Thursday have the highest open rates and click-through rates, as well as being the most popular day to send emails. Weekends were the least popular days to send emails, and they also had the lowest open rates.
The ideal send frequency
Send frequency influences both opens and unsubscribes. Campaign Monitor found that the highest open rate always occurred on the first send. They also found that the more campaigns you send, the more unique numbers of people will open your campaigns. But only to a point.
Slowly increasing the frequency of your emails requires you be mindful of your customers. Try to strike a healthy balance between informational and promotional content—erring on the side of informational with relevant and useful promotions peppered in—to develop a nice and consistent cadence.
There is a lot of data but no exact benchmark number, so it’s essential to find the right mix of content to deliver to your segmented lists of customers.
Feature Photo by Caroline Selfors on Unsplash
