When it comes to email marketing campaigns, it’s hard to know whether your campaigns are performing well or just sub-par. Obviously you can compare campaigns to prior months or even the same campaign from the previous year — but is that really giving you the data you need?
For many companies, the best way to truly understand how their campaigns are performing is to compare their metrics with relevant email marketing benchmarks. But it’s important to make sure you’re looking at the right benchmarks to gauge where your campaigns fall into the mix.
For example, the benchmark standards for open and conversion rates can vary drastically from industry and even based on campaign type. That’s why it’s important that you search out a few different benchmarks to compare.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a few different benchmarks to get you started and provide you with 10 email automation platforms that can help you improve your current metrics.
Just looking to learn more about the platforms we’ll cover? Here’s a quick look at the different platforms we’ll discuss:
- Listrak
- Rejoiner
- Constant Contact
- Delivra
- Campaigner
- Maropost
- Keap
- Zoho Campaigns
- Campaign Monitor
- GetResponse
Understanding Email Marketing Benchmarks
There are multiple ways to look at your email marketing benchmarks to understand where your current efforts fit in. In this article, we’ll take a look at three different benchmark scenarios:
- Benchmarks by campaign type
- Benchmarks by industry type
But before diving into each scenario, let’s discuss a few pieces of terminology that you’ll hear throughout this section. While some of this may be common knowledge for many, it’s good to define what the different benchmarks we will discuss mean.
- Open Rate: this is the percentage of subscribers who opened your email
- Click to Open Rate: this refers to the number of unique clicks to unique opens and can help measure the overall effectiveness of your email’s content
- Click Through Rate: the number of subscribers who clicked through your email to your website
- Conversion Rate: the number of subscribers who took action from your email — this could mean they downloaded a brochure, purchased an item, or whatever your CTA may have been
- Revenue Per Email Sent: a calculation that allows you to identify exactly how much revenue you gained per email sent within a given campaign
- Bounce Rate: the number of messages that did not make it to a customer’s inbox, this could be for a variety of different reasons
- Unsubscribe Rate: the number of subscribers who choose to unsubscribe from your email marketing campaigns
- Spam Rate: the number of subscribers who marked your email as spam
Now that you have a basic understanding of the terminology you’ll see moving forward, let’s jump into the first email marketing benchmark.
Email Marketing Benchmarks by Campaign Type
One of the ways you can look at your email marketing benchmarks is by campaign type. You’re likely already sending multiple different campaign types to your customers based on their segmentation and purchasing journey data — so you’ll like to have basic metrics to compare.
As a starting point, the table below gives you an overview of multiple different campaign types and the typical email marketing benchmarks for each. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call out a few of the most commonly used campaigns to briefly discuss.
Your email metrics can vary based on the different campaigns you’re running. Understanding the benchmarks for the campaigns you actively engage your customers with will tell you how your metrics standup. Image courtesy of Listrak.
Welcome Series
Most companies utilizing email marketing have some form of a welcome series for new subscribers. That’s why it’s one of the campaigns we chose to callout the benchmarks related to this type of program.
Welcome emails are sent to new subscribers to introduce them to your brand and nurture them into purchasing customers. This is a great example that tells a customer exactly what to expect from the brand. Image courtesy of Campaign Monitor.
The benchmarks to know:
- Open Rate: 27.38%
- Click to Open Rate: 18.14%
- Conversion Rate: 10.71%
- Revenue Per Email Sent: $.95
Welcome series are designed to engage new subscribers and start to build a relationship with the user. To create high performing welcome emails, you’ll want to remember that this is the very beginning of this customer’s journey and this time should be used to welcome and nurture the new lead.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
Another commonly used campaign type is related to shopping cart abandonment. These emails are designed to encourage customers to return to your website and complete a purchase they left behind — meaning conversions and revenue are key metrics.
No matter what the product they left behind (even a mattress!) — you can still send a quick reminder to encourage the subscriber to come back and complete their purchase. This example reminds the customer about the product and provides a little sense of urgency to make the purchase. Image courtesy of Shopify.
The benchmarks to know:
- Open Rate: 30.13%
- Click to Open Rate: 22.64%
- Conversion Rate: 21.06%
- Revenue Per Email Sent: $2.14
Triggered by a specific event, abandoned cart campaigns can help to reduce lost revenue and encourage customers to come back to your site. This type of campaign is one of the highest performing email marketing tactics and can have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Price Drop Alert
While price drop alerts may not be as common as the last two campaign types, they are still a great way to engage customers. These messages are sent to let customers know that there was a price drop on a product they were previously interested in.
Let your customers know when the products they’ve been looking at drop in price to encourage them to come back and check them out again — and hopefully make a purchase. This example reminds the subscriber about the product and lets them know right away why they’re receiving the message. Image courtesy of Rejoiner.
The benchmarks to know:
- Open Rate: 36.3%
- Click to Open Rate: 39.42%
- Conversion Rate: 12.21%
- Revenue Per Email Sent: $1.23
Price drop alerts will likely garner a high number of open rates because they are based on previous customer interactions or browsing behaviors. Always make sure your customer data is up-to-date before sending price drop alerts — you wouldn’t want to notify someone who already purchased the product.
Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry Type
Anytime you’re looking at benchmarks, it’s important to consider how others in your industry are performing. It’s unlikely that companies that fall within the government-industry will have the same open, clicks, and conversions that an eCommerce retail company will.
The table below will allow you to understand where you fall within your industry benchmarks and provide you with the numbers that you’ll want to strive to exceed. Let’s take a deeper look at the metrics for a few very different industries to gain a better understanding of the variations from industry to industry.
Your industry can play a big role in how well your campaigns perform. This list provides you with a good starting point to identify whether your campaigns are performing up to the standard. Image courtesy of Campaign Monitor.
Retail Industry
If you’re a company in the retail industry, these are the benchmarks you should strive to meet or exceed through your email marketing campaigns.
The benchmarks to know:
- Open Rate: 13.90%
- Click Through Rate: 2.10%
- Click to Open Rate: 15.20%
- Unsubscribe Rate: .10%
- Bounce Rate: .40%
So how do your current metrics stand up? If you’re lower than these industry benchmarks, don’t freight. You have plenty of room to grow and improve your current efforts to eventually blow these metrics out of the water.
Government Industry
The government-industry topped the chart with the highest open rate and when you compare them to the retail industry — there’s no comparison. This is the perfect example as to why it’s important to understand the specific benchmarks related to your industry.
The benchmarks to know:
- Open Rate: 30.50%
- Click Through Rate: 4.10%
- Click to Open Rate: 13.40%
- Unsubscribe Rate: .20%
- Bounce Rate: 1.30%
Overall, emails sent in the government-industry perform very well. Chances are good if you’re sending messages to customers within this audience group, you’re seeing similar results. But if your results are quite up to par with the industry standard, keep working to improve your campaigns and you’ll see positive results.
Travel, Hospitality, and Leisure Industry
To provide another industry to compare, we’ve included the travel, hospitality, and leisure industry as well. When you compare these metrics to that of the retail industry, you’ll see the results are much closer.
The benchmarks to know:
- Open Rate: 15.70%
- Click Through Rate:1.60%
- Click to Open RAte: 10.20%
- Unsubscribe Rate: .10%
- Bounce Rate: .50%
Similar to the other groupings, you’ll want your metrics to come as close to these benchmarks as you can — but there’s always room to grow and improve. Every email will perform differently and it takes time to learn what resonates best with your customers.
Investing in the right program will provide you with all of the tools you need to improve your current campaigns and meet or exceed the current benchmarks. So now that you have an understanding of what a typical email marketing benchmark looks like, let’s take a look at a few different platforms designed to help you improve your metrics.
10 Email Automation Companies to Know
When it comes to improving your email marketing benchmarks, nothing can help you do that quicker or easier than investing in a marketing automation platform. There are a variety of different platforms out there, and they each offer a variety of ways for you to improve your current email marketing efforts.
Here are just a few different ways you can expect to see an increase in your email benchmarks with the assistance of an automation platform:
- A/B testing: most platforms will provide you with A/B testing capabilities to learn what your customers engage with and then automatically send the highest performing message
- Improved customer insights: an automation platform will allow you to gather, manage and understand both historical and real-time customer data
- Responsive email design: with simple to use email builders and templates, you can easily create professional emails that are optimized for all device types without needing to code anything
- Predictive analytics: predict the future needs of your customers based on their behaviors and interactions with your emails to improve metrics across the board
- Understanding the customer journey: target and send emails that are designed to help move them through their customer journey
- Grow your subscriber list: continuing to grow your subscriber list is an important step to improving your email marketing benchmark because you’ll inevitably lose subscribers and if you aren’t working to reach new customers your metrics will eventually peak
Email automation platforms will help you reach your email marketing goals and do more with the time you have. Let’s take a look at 10 email automation platforms that can help you reach and exceed the industry benchmarks.
1. Listrak
Listrak is a retail digital marketing automation platform that will help you take your email marketing to the next level and set the standard for email benchmarks. From email management to better customer data insights and predictive technology, you’ll find everything you need here.
Listrak allows you to manage, test, and monitor your email marketing campaigns from one central location. You can also leverage all of your customer data and gain a deeper understanding of what your customer wants and needs. Image courtesy of Listrak.
Ways Listrak can help you improve your email metrics:
- Gather and understand customer data with the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics capabilities
- Market to customers based on their real-time interaction and send emails to help move them through their purchasing journey
- Easily create beautifully designed, responsive emails that will capture customer attention on any device
- Testing that allows you to test variants including content, audience, variations, timing, metrics, and more — then the platform will automatically delivery the winning message to your larger audiences
Why choose Listrak? With this automation platform, you’ll have the backing of real-time customer data and predictive capabilities to know exactly what your customers need.
2. Rejoiner
Rejoiner is an email automation platform that provides you with all the tools you need to make the most out of every email. Whether it’s abandoned cart messages or an email builder design to make your emails stand out — you can do it with this platform.
Abandoned cart emails can bring more customers back to your site and increase your monthly sales numbers. With Rejoiner you can easily create email workflows that bring customers back to their abandoned carts and increase your email conversion rates. Image courtesy of Rejoiner.
Ways Rejoiner can help you improve your email metrics:
- Automated trigger emails delivered to customers at the right times throughout the customer lifecycle such as abandonment messages and win-back campaigns
- A/B test email templates and workflows to identify the highest performing content and increase engagement
- Dynamically build segments to reach more customer and develop targeted campaigns that are likely to convert
- Use their drag and drop email editor to build emails that look professional and render on any device they are opened on
Why choose Rejoiner? From easy email development to dynamic segmentation, this automation platform provides you with everything you need to reach your customers and improve your metrics in the process.
3. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an email marketing automation platform that is designed to help you better reach your customers and improve your metrics from open rates to conversions and sales. With the help of email tools such as triggered messages and a focus on list segmentation and growth — Constant Contact will help you continue to grow.
Constant Contact provides you with easy to use email templates that will create beautifully designed messages every time. Simply drag and drop the content you want to include and let the platform do the rest for you. Image courtesy of Constant Contact.
Ways Constant Contact can help you improve your email metrics:
- Develop campaigns based on the needs of your customers including welcome campaigns, trigger emails, and more
- Segment your subscriber list to improve personalization and relevancy in your messages to see an increase in open and click through rates
- Easily grow and manage your subscriber list to reach more customers and continue to increase your metrics across the board
- Make selling easier with drag and drop email template that incorporates your eCommerce templates
Why choose Constant Contact? This platform is a great option for eCommerce companies looking for a way to easily incorporate product content and integrate with various other platforms for the full customer view.
4. Delivra
Delivra is a marketing automation platform that can help you build effective email marketing campaigns that allow you to reach your customer and continue to grow your platform. Through tactics such as list building and automation, you can easily continue to improve your email metrics.
With Delivra you can easily create emails through their drag and drop editor, but you can also ensure they’ll appear exactly how you expect. Previewing your emails allows you to know exactly what your customers will see when they open your message. Image courtesy of Delivra.
Ways Delivra can help you improve your email metrics:
- Grow your subscriber list to continue to find new customers and increase your potential reach for each campaign
- Create emails with a simple drag and drop editor or choose from pre-designed templates — whatever your choice they will all be optimized and responsive
- Identify customer preferences and segment subscribers to ensure you’re sending the most relevant messages every time
- Automate email marketing campaigns based on customer data then customize and adapt to their future actions
Why choose Delivra? This platform will help you grow your email marketing in a number of different ways — from creating emails that will convert to automating your process you can begin to improve your campaign benchmarks.
5. Campaigner
Campaigner is a marketing automation platform that provides customers with a variety of different email marketing capabilities to help you improve your current monthly metrics. From improved A/B testing capabilities to eCommerce integrations — you’re sure to see an increase in your campaigns.
From capture to conversion and more — Campaigner can help you create campaigns that turn new subscribers into return customers in no time. With this platform, there’s something to help you improve your process at every step in the customer journey. Image courtesy of Campaigner.
Ways Campaigner can help you improve your email metrics:
- Send customers triggered emails based on their behavioral and conversational data to ensure the most relevant interactions
- Use dynamic content throughout your emails to improve personalization and increase customer engagement
- Integrate your eCommerce store to drive customers directly to products and boost sales
- Test emails with multivariate A/B testing capabilities to learn even more about what works and what doesn’t work for your customers Ways Delivra can help you improve your email benchmarks:
Why choose Campaigner? This platform allows you to do everything you need to improve your email benchmarks and has an exceptional customer satisfaction score to back it.
6. Maropost
Maropost is a marketing automation platform that will allow you to see a full 360-degree view of your customers and gain a better understanding of their individual needs. From there, you can integrate the platform with various other programs you are already using to take your customer understanding to the next level.
Know exactly how your campaigns are performing and understand when customers are most likely to engage with your content throughout the day. A simple reporting dashboard will allow you to know exactly what’s working and what might need some adjusting. Image courtesy of Maropost.
Ways Maropost can help you improve your email metrics:
- Dynamic email personalization that provides you with a 360-degree view of each customer
- Quickly and easily build email journeys to provide customers with a consistent experience across all devices and platforms
- Use customer data to learn exactly what and when to send messages to your customers for the highest engagement numbers
- Integrate with various other platforms to connect all of your customer data and see a holistic view of their journey
Why choose Maropost? This platform allows you to easily see what and when each customer is engaging with your content, data that will allow you to improve their experience even further.
7. Keap
Keap’s marketing automation platform allows you to manage your email marketing and sales process in one location — improving the customer experience from start to finish. From creating email workflows to ensure customers receive follow-up to providing your sales teams with the tasks they need to land a sale.
Make your customer interactions easier than ever before. From instant follow-up messages to standardizing your sales process, Keap can help you do it all. Image courtesy of Keap.
Ways Keap can help you improve your email metrics:
- Create workflows that are based on when/then interactions your customers take to automate the follow-up process
- Send trigger emails to your customers at the right time based on customer interactions such as booking an appointment or downloading an ebook
- Develop automated emails sent to customers as they move from one stage of the sales funnel to the next
- Keep your sales teams consistent with standard tasks and checklists for each customer based on their current interactions and data
Why choose Keap? This platform is a great option for companies that have a sales team that works closely with their customer base. You can manage and automate emails sent to customers and improve the sales process all at once.
8. Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing software that will help you drive more sales by creating high performing email campaigns based on real customer data. You’ll have the ability to test, monitor, and interact with customers on each campaign to continue gaining more insights.
With Zoho Campaigns, you can easily A/B test your emails to ensure you’re sending the larger audience the highest performing content. Test and change variants such as sender address, email content, subject line, and more. Image courtesy of Zoho Campaigns.
Ways Zoho Campaigns can help you improve your email metrics:
- A/B testing that allows you to identify which variations encourage more customer engagement
- Test and preview emails before sending to ensure that your content and layout are exactly what you’re expecting and that emails are optimized for multiple devices
- Optimize send times by understanding customer data and learning when customers are most likely to engage with your content
- Track and manage customer replies to gain even more insights about your campaigns directly from your customers
Why choose Zoho Campaigns? This marketing platform allows you to grow a stronger customer base, which will in turn result in higher engagement and conversion rates.
9. Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is an email automation platform that will provide you with everything you need to kick your email marketing up a notch. With testing capabilities and advanced personalization tactics like smart segmentation — you’ll quickly see the benefits.
Automate your email marketing process by creating workflows to help move customers through their personal journeys. Create yes/no scenarios that automatically identify what content to send next. Image courtesy of Campaign Monitor.
Ways Campaign Monitor can help you improve your email metrics:
- Automate email journeys to improve personalization and send messages at the right time based on customer behaviors and interests
- Drag and drop email editor that is easy to use and ensure mobile optimization for every template you use
- Utilize smart segmentation and detailed subscriber lists to drive more engagement and build relationships with your customers
- Grow your subscriber base by adding signup forms into your website to continue finding new customers
Why choose Campaign Monitor? This platform allows you to manage your email marketing in one location and improve your metrics through tactics like automation, device optimization, and improved personalization.
10. GetResponse
GetResponse is an email marketing software that will improve your current email marketing through customer data and simplified campaign development. By using an easy to use email builder and leveraging dynamic content, your messages are sure to convert.
Personalization is one of the most important factors in getting customers to engage with your content. With GetResponse you can easily incorporate personalization into all of your email marketing efforts. Image courtesy of GetResponse.
Ways GetResponse can help you improve your email metrics:
- Create automated follow-up emails to continue to engage and connect with subscribers throughout their entire purchasing journey
- Know exactly when to send emails for the highest open and click-through rates with their Perfect Timing and Time Travel delivery tool
- Develop responsive emails that encourage customers to continue reading
- Use customer data to create a personalized experience through more targeted messaging that displays custom and dynamic content
Why choose GetRespone? This platform is a great option when looking for an email automation solution that provides you with a way to turn customer insights into campaigns that result in higher metrics.
Improve Your Email Marketing Benchmarks and Knockout the Competition
Are you finding that your email marketing benchmarks aren’t quite living up to the standards discussed in this article? Now’s the time to take action.
Benchmarks are created to provide guidance on where other companies stand and that means you can not only meet, but exceed these numbers. While you may need to sit down and roll your sleeves up, you have the power to change the performance of your email marketing efforts.
Implementing automation, personalization, improved segmentation, and more allows you to encourage customers to interact and engage with your content. The more relevant it is to their needs, the more likely they are to open, click, and convert — luckily the right platform makes this easy.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start improving your customer interactions — soon the metric increases will come naturally.