Understanding Email Marketing Benchmarks

What email marketing metrics should your business measure?

It’s a no-brainer that the KPIs you should measure depend on your goals. In other words, the metrics you track for a particular newsletter might be different from others. Despite this, there are a few basic indicators that you should always track:

Bounce rate

The very first thing you should check is how many of your emails are being bounced. To put it in another way, how many emails aren’t even reaching your subscribers’ inboxes. Bounces can either be soft – temporary email address problems such as a full inbox for instance – or hard, which includes permanent issues like misspelled or deactivated email addresses.

Spam complaints

Spam is the killer of email marketing. If your emails are being redirected to your subscribers’ spam box, they’ll never read them there. On top of this, email service providers block accounts with a high spam rate. Therefore, it’s essential you keep tabs on this metric and do everything in your power to keep your emails away from the trash.

Open rate

Open rate is the most basic email marketing KPI – it tracks how many of your subscribers are opening your emails, making it the perfect statistic for you to understand if you’re writing compelling subject lines.

Click-through rate

After understanding who is opening your emails, it’s time to check who is clicking the links included in the newsletter. This commonly used metric allows you to understand if you’re displaying links correctly and whether you’re writing appealing calls-to-action or not.

Conversion rate

Now that you know how many subscribers are accessing your website through your emails, you need to see how many of them are actually being converted. In other words, how many web visitors are doing what you intend them to do – downloading an ebook, buying a product, getting in touch, etc.

Unsubscribe rate

Seeing people unsubscribing from your list isn’t fun. However, this KPI is an essential factor to understand whether your email marketing strategy is working or not. For example, a sudden rise of unsubscribing after you made some changes to your newsletter means that you should reconsider the alteration.

Top email marketing benchmarks

It’s no wonder that the top email marketing benchmarks are related to the KPIs you definitely should be tracking. Benchmarks will obviously differ depending on the industry your business is in, but the average numbers already give you an insight into how well your email marketing is performing.

According to Mailchimp, the average open rate is 21.33% overall. Government organizations are the ones who see their emails being opened most often (28.77%), going against vitamin supplement companies, which see the lowest open rate (15.03%).

When it comes to the average click rate, the email marketing average is 2.62%. In this case, newsletters regarding hobbies are the ones in front with 5.01%. Restaurants trail behind, with only 1.34% of subscribers clicking on their links.

Unlike the other two, you want to be below the bounce’s average rate. For hard bounces, you should be getting up to 0.40%, while for soft bounces 0.58%. The same goes for the unsubscribe rate, which average is 0.26%.

Indeed, comparing your stats with your industry’s average is a nice way to understand how your email marketing strategy is performing. On the one hand, if your results are above average, you’re doing something right. On the other hand, if they’re below, it’s time to review your email marketing strategy. That being said, it’s not only essential to constantly track your in-house metrics but also take advantage of strategies such as A/B testing (offered by providers like GetResponse or Constant Contact) to understand what works best. This feature provides vital insights about different versions of your newsletters to better comprehend which ones are more effective.

Regardless of whether you’re just starting out or you’re an email marketing pro, tracking your KPIs is necessary to improve your newsletter’s performance. If you check our recommendations, you’re halfway to improving your email marketing’s return on investment. Next, it’s time to act on those metrics.