Email marketing builds customer relationships, boosts loyalty, and expands your reach. An effective email strategy converts leads into customers. Additionally, email marketing enables you to connect with your audience in a personalized way that’s cost-effective compared to other marketing methods.
However, assessing the success of your email campaigns can be tricky, especially considering that benchmarks vary across industries. To help you out, we’ve analyzed benchmarks for over 20 industries and compiled data that will offer practical insights and serve as a guide to measure your campaign performance. This valuable data will help you understand how your campaigns stack up against the competition within your specific industry.
Understanding email marketing metrics:
Before we jump into the details, here are the metrics you need to be familiar with:
- Open rate: It’s the percentage of subscribers that opened your email, based on the number of email recipients. For instance, if you send an email to 10 people and 5 open it, your open rate is 50%.
- Click-through rate: It’s a strategy-level metric because it takes into account the percentage of clicks on a link or image in an email, based on the total number of emails sent.
- Unsubscribe rate: It’s the percentage of subscribers that unsubscribed from an email, based on the total number of recipients. For instance, if you send an email to 10 people and 2 unsubscribe, your unsubscribe rate is 2%.
- Bounce rate: It’s the percentage of emails that were not delivered, based on the total number of emails sent. This can happen for a variety of reasons (spam issues or server errors).
Email marketing benchmarks 2024
Overall average | Percentage |
Average open rate | 19.21 |
Average CTR | 2.44 |
Average unsubscribe rate | 0.89 |
Average bounce rate | 2.48 |
Email marketing benchmarks across industries:
To know about email marketing benchmarks by industry, take a look at the table below.
Going beyond the average: Days of the week matters
Running your email campaign on specific days can drive better results. According to data, open rates are fairly consistent throughout the week. However, weekends generally show lower engagement. If you’re carrying out an email marketing campaign for your business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) brand, mid-week days like Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are ideal.
Meanwhile, the optimal times to send out newsletters or run email marketing campaigns include breakfast, lunchtime, and early evening, likely coinciding with commutes and typical work hours.
Email marketing benchmarks: CTR rates by day of the week
Email marketing benchmarks: Open rates by day of the week
How to improve email campaign performance?
Here are some key strategies to help improve your email campaign performance:
To increase email open rates, try out these tips:
- Personalize subject lines to grab attention.
- Test different subject line variations (length, tone, CTA, emoji) through A/B testing.
- Include an email preheader to give readers a reason to open.
- Try different sender name variations.
- Test combinations of the subject line and sender name using multivariate testing.
- Send emails from a different email address.
- Experiment with sending on different days or at different times to find the best time.
- Remove inactive subscribers to improve engagement.
Improve email click-to-open rate by following these tips:
- Segment subscribers into smaller, more relevant groups.
- Improve content relevancy.
- Ensure the subject line reflects the email content accurately.
- Design buttons and links to be prominently displayed.
- Enhance the copy and call-to-action (CTA) to be more engaging.
- Offer compelling incentives for clicks.
- A/B test different email scripts to understand audience preferences.
- Provide multiple clickable options like blog post links, surveys, quizzes, etc.
To lower the number of unsubscribes and bounces, test these tips:
- Choosing double opt-in ensures a clean list and better deliverability.
- Send campaigns more frequently to build reader relationships and maintain a regular schedule.
- Ensure cleaning the email list with the help of an email validation tool.
- Ensure email content aligns with subscribers’ interests.
- Make sure subject lines accurately reflect email content to meet reader expectations.
By testing out these tips, you can improve your chances to drive engagement and ultimately achieve your marketing goals.
Takeaway!
With email marketing benchmarks you can identify what works and what doesn’t, enabling you to optimize future campaigns for better results. They provide insights into your audience’s behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns.
Moreover, comparing your campaign performance against industry norms helps you set realistic goals and achieve desired results. However, if tracking and optimizing seem daunting, let us take the reins for you. With our data-driven strategies, we can help you run effective email campaigns. Contact our campaign expert for more details.
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