Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics

Open Rates:

After analyzing the performance of different email campaigns among various industries, we found that the average open rate for emails was 19.67%

Therefore, any open rate equal to 20% or above is considered as an indicator of a successful email campaign.

How to improve open rates?

A marketer’s main concern is to achieve a high open-rate and reach the goals set up for the email campaign prepared. Therefore, having a high open-rate is important.

However, open rates do not mean your campaign was successful, clicks are another important factor of a successful campaign.

If you’re suffering from a low open rate for your campaigns, you should follow these tips:

• Use a relevant subject line, interesting enough to capture the recipient’s attention.
• Choose the right audience.
• Do not send too many or too few campaigns.
• Use chunk sending.
• Do not send emails to purchased lists.
• Allow recipients to update their preferences.
• Create a sunset policy.

Using a relevant subject line: Do not judge a book by its cover, however, the title of the book plays an important role in grabbing the reader’s attention. Same thing applies to emails, in order for the recipient to open the email, the subject should be interesting. Using A/B testing at this stage on a small sample of recipients is important to decide which subject line is more successful for the campaign.

Choose the right audience: Choosing the right audience is a very important factor in increasing the open rate. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, do not expect to reach the desired open rate. Examples of wrong audience may be inactive recipients (contacts who did not open the last campaign(s), contacts who belong to another industry..).

Do not send too many or too few campaigns: When sending too many emails, your contacts eventually will get bored and stop opening the emails. If you’re sending too few emails, your contacts will forget about you and stop opening them as well. The key is to send the right amount of emails based on the industry. Targeting your audience from another channel is very important. For example, use social media, landing pages…

Use chunk sending: Chunk sending is a sending process that allows you to send your campaign in smaller batches to optimize your deliverability and create a domain warmup process.

Do not send emails to purchased lists: Purchased lists often include old or bad data that lead to honeypot traps and are easily detected by ESPs. They trigger high bounce rates and low engagement which can impact your reputation negatively. Make sure to build your own lists of contacts through proper nurture or client relationships.

Allow recipients to update their preferences: This is very important for companies that send different types of content. You can let people signup for your product update versus your event announcements for example.

Create a sunset policy: What are you doing with unengaged contacts? Do you always entire your entire database or do you create segments of highly engaged contacts? Think of suppressing contacts that have not engaged with you in the past 6 to 12 months, through opens or clicks, by creating reactivation and goodbye automation campaigns.

Best and worst days for sending emails:

An analysis of the open rates and clicks throughout the week shows the following:

• Best day with highest email open rates: Friday. (19.3%)
• Best days with highest click-through rates: Friday. (2.9%)
• Best days with highest click-to-open rates: Wednesday and Friday. (14.4%)
• Email unsubscribe rates are almost the same throughout the week. (0.1%)
• Worst day with lowest email open rates: Saturday. (17.5%)
• Worst days with lowest click-through rates: Saturday. (2.6%)
• Worst day with lowest click-to-open rates: Tuesday. (13.8%)

Click rate:

The average click rate for different types of email campaigns is 2.61%.

Any percentage equal or greater than this number is a sign of a successful campaign.

If you believe that your campaign is not generating the click rate that you expected, we compiled a few tips that will improve your click rates.

How to improve click rates

To improve click rates, work on the content in order to make it more appealing and interesting for your target audience. You should choose the proper audience as well who will be interested in this content. The design plays an important role as well, which is why we prepared ready-made templates at your convenience.

Adding more links to your campaign makes it more effective. Making the text click-through will definitely increase your click rate.

Add the proper links: Do not add irrelevant links or general links that will have the recipient go through different pages before reaching the right page.

Use the same link more than once within the campaign: For example, you can add two CTAs for the same action within the campaign, one at the beginning and one at the end to remind the recipient of the button and increase the click rate.

Testing the content of your campaign using A/B testing: Other than the subject line, you can use A/B testing with your content on a sample audience to check which content is more engaging, hence improving your click rate.

Make sure that your subject line accurately reflects the content of your emails: If the subject line is irrelevant to the content, the recipient won’t be interested in the content and won’t click within the campaign, which refers to a low click-through rate.

Tips for Improving Your Email Marketing Statistics:

Open and click-through rates will eventually improve your email marketing stats overall. 

Here are some tips to improve your email marketing statistics:

• Write an effective, straightforward subject line.
• Make sure to follow all the tips on avoiding spam. (a link for our article)
• If you’re facing too many hard bounces, it’s a sign that your list needs cleaning. Check our article on maintaining a good list’s hygiene. (a link for our article)
• Most of the soft bounces occur when a contact is temporarily unavailable. Try to avoid soft bouncers for a few campaigns and try again later.