A complete guide on email marketing benchmarks!!
Email marketing is one of the widely accepted methods of reaching the target audience. It sends commercial messages, using emails to reach out to the target audience for one’s services, products, or brand awareness.
Although emails are a formal way of communication used for official declaration or sharing information to the prospect, nowadays, it is being used as one of the forms of advertisements.
Every mail sent to a potential customer or the existing one should be taken care of before sending, as each email has a significant impact on the brand message, image, and reflection among the customers.
Having such significance, keeping an eye on the Email marketing benchmarks becomes highly essential.
Email Marketing
Email marketing, no less than advertisements, is used aggressively to build trust, brand awareness, and develop loyalty.
Email marketing plays a crucial role in attracting, developing, and maintaining consumer relationships.
It evolves relationships with the present and the previous clients, boosts customers’ trust over the company, urging them to repeat the purchase, converting more prospects into customers, and persuading them to buy their goods or services.
Advantages of Email Marketing
There are several reasons to use email marketing to boost business and reach out to the broader audience, which is not possible with any other existing means.
Affordable
Email marketing serves as an incredibly cheap medium. As compared to the traditional mediums, it is significantly cost-effective and affordable.
Speed
Email marketing reaches the receiver at a rocket speed, defying the traditional methods. Email marketing has made it possible to reach customers in no time.
As soon as the message is sent, it gets delivered. This ensures that the prospect has at least received the message sent by the sender.
Email Deliverability
Email marketing helps keep track of the receivers who welcome the messages sent via emails. This method confirms email deliverability.
Tracking
Email marketing sends emails in bulk, which helps study the consumers’ response and behavior. Along with email deliverability, the receiver’s actions can be tracked via Email marketing which is not the case in traditional methods.
This helps in understanding consumer behaviors, needs, and responses.
Accessible
The exponential growth of the internet has made email accessible to most targets and hence, made it more feasible for one to reach instantly to the customers.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Companies use a campaign known as an email marketing campaign. Different campaigns are used for achieving different goals.
Each email marketing campaign consists of a call to action at the end of the email that urges people to take action. This action can be filling a feedback form, asking for a review, link to the websites, blog post, or products.
The campaign monitor then tracks this email marketing campaign to study the email marketing statistics and analyze campaign performance.
Several email marketing strategy is used by the brands and companies, out of which the popular ones are mentioned below:-
- Email Newsletters
- Acquisition Emails
- Retention Emails
- Promotional Emails
Email Newsletters
Email Newsletters are one of the most widely accepted and favored email marketing campaigns.
It can be a valuable tool for growing businesses as it provides subscribers with the latest developments, announcements, and efficient use of their products.
It also provides additional value by increasing retention, engagement, and building trust. It is often sent to subscribers’ inboxes as a weekly newsletter or sometimes monthly.
Acquisition Emails
This campaign is used to convert prospects interested in your product or service but hasn’t become a part of the community.
Companies share attractive offers, information, and services to convert prospects into clients via acquisition emails.
It targets the user to boost one’s business, sales and expand the community.
Retention Emails
Retention emails are used by businesses to keep the scope for communication open. They send various emails such as feedback, offers, or subscription to stay in touch with their clients.
It is beneficial in keeping up with the hard-earned clients.
Promotional Emails
It is used to showcase new launches, offers, and deals. It is sent to encourage the client to buy after convincing them of the best value.
Often referral codes, offers, discounts are sent to subscribers’ inboxes to tempt email clients and convince them to buy from you.
Email Marketing Benchmarks
Above, we have discussed Email Marketing, its advantages, and types of email marketing. But how will we know if we are gaining what we are targeting via email marketing?
For understanding, if we are moving in the right direction and our email marketing strategies are working, the industry uses several email marketing benchmarks.
The email marketing benchmarks help them analyze which email campaigns go well with the company and which do not yield many results.
Before beginning with the marketing benchmarks, it is essential to know a few necessary things while diving into email marketing statistics.
Let’s have a quick overview of the Jargons used while dealing with email campaigns and marketing benchmarks.
Email marketing benchmarks & Jargons
Email subject lines
The subject line is the first thing that a mail receiver sees after the sender sends the mail. It describes the purpose of the email. The subject line length is usually one line and gives the gist of the whole email.
The general behavior of the receiver suggests that people tend to decide if they want to check the mail or not merely by reading the subject lines.
A strong subject line provides an added value to the mail. It encourages the prospect to acknowledge the email in the first place duly. The chances of click rate increases if the subject line length is brief, the subject line is catchy, concise, and informative.
Click rate
The email click rate or the email click-through rate in the email marketing benchmark is one of the metrics to measure the number of clicks on email concerning the total number of emails sent.
Email click-through rate or CTR is the percentage of total emails sent to the number of emails gained one click from the subscriber.
The higher the click rates, the higher is the audience engagement, and hence click rate percentage is equally proportional to the level of engagement the email had for the subscriber.
Unsubscribe rates
Unsubscribe rates indicate the number of subscribers who unsubscribed after receiving the email. It is a voluntary action of the receiver to choose not to receive any further emails.
Unsubscribe rates reflect shortcomings in email marketing.
Open Rates
Open rates in email marketing estimate the number of emails opened after delivering. Higher email open rates indicate a compelling subject line, whereas lower email open rates indicate an inefficient email strategy or email campaign.
Click to open rates
Click to open rates implies the percentage of subscribers who opened the email and accessed the given link within the email.
As mentioned, open rates signify the effectiveness of the subject line, whereas click-to-open rate tells the effectiveness of email marketing.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is used to understand the retention of subscribers on the website. It is represented as the percentage of visitors who entered the site and left, i.e., bounced instead of browsing further to a different page.
But in the case of emails, bounce rate is the number of emails that weren’t delivered to the recipient’s server.
Spam complaint rates
A spam complaint is when the email receiver reports not wanting to see further emails from that site.
Call to action
While subject lines lead and email body explain, the closing of an email directs the target audience to make an action to the suggested call to action. It is the direction provided by the sender to the receiver to achieve a goal.
The sender’s goal is to direct the email recipient towards a direction for which the email is written. If the email successfully directs the recipient towards the call to action, the email marketing is considered successful.
It is a general rule among the marketing team to add a call to action at the end of the mail to direct the prospect towards the service or the product pitched in the mail body.
8 Proven Email Marketing Benchmarks
1. Open Rate – 1st Door to Successful Campaign
It is the simplest and highly accepted approach by email marketers. As stated, open rates in email marketing estimate the number of emails opened after delivering.
The open rate for different companies differs for specific reasons, yet, the average available rate in the industry is around 17.8%.
There can be several reasons for a lower email open rate. Uncompelling subject lines can be one of the reasons for a lower email open rate than the average email open rate.
Higher email open rates indicate a compelling subject line, whereas lower email open rates indicate an inefficient email strategy.
How can it be improved?
- Effective subject line
- Relevant length and tone of the subject line
- Personalized emails (with the name of the sender)
2. Click-through rate (CTR) – A Welcome by the Receiver
Click-through rate or CTR is one of the email marketing benchmarks that can help determine the marketing campaign’s performance.
Email click-through rate or CTR is the percentage of the total number of emails sent to the number of links clicked in the email.
The higher the click rates, the higher is the audience engagement.
This can be enhanced by thoughtfully placing the links in a position that catches the sight of the subscriber.
The average click-through rate is significantly lower than the open rate and is about 3%. This average click-through rate varies from one company to another depending on what they deliver to the customers.
3. Bounce rate – Address not found!
Bounce rates are the failure in delivering the email to the subscriber. This can be due to technical problems or an issue with the subscriber’s email address.
Depending on the extent of the problem, bounce rates are of two types:-
- Soft bounce
- Hard bounce
Soft bounce
A soft bounce is when the email is not delivered due to a temporary issue, either technical or with the email address.
Hard bounce
A hard bounce is when there is a permanent problem with the email address. Hard bounces indicated an old email address, fake email address, or some mistake in writing the email address. Too many hard bounces raise the question about the subscriber lists.
To verify this, companies ask for double-checking one’s email Id before subscribing to ensure the correct email address. This decreases the chance of bounce rates and increases the quality of the email list.
Hence, bounce rates show the quality of the subscriber list and can be one of the dependable email marketing benchmarks which can be verified on the campaign monitor.
4. Conversion rate – Client Offers a Tea
It is the conversion of a prospect into a client. The conversion rates assess the number of people who purchased by clicking on the link provided in the email.
It helps understand the return of investment done on the email marketing campaign.
5. Number of Unsubscriptions – Door-bell not answered
This is one of the fundamental yet most effective email marketing benchmarks. Unsubscribe rate is the number of unsubscribing done after receiving the email.
These email marketing metrics can be a true reflection of email marketing. It is the number of unsubscribers in every 1000 mails. The average email unsubscribes rate, which is considerable, is 0.1% that is 1 unsubscription in every 1000 emails.
The average unsubscribe rate can be monitored on the campaign monitor.
In average metrics, an unsubscribe rate of more than 0.1% should be a worrisome trend for the company, but the companies take it optimistically. After the subscription, the email list keeps filtering and refining with time.
But this doesn’t mean it is ok to have unsubscriptions. A hike in unsubscription damages the online reputation and adversely affects the campaign.
6. List growth rate – A way towards bigger community
It is the rise in subscribers in a given time. It is calculated as new subscribers, minus unsubscribers, divided by total email addresses, multiplied by 100.
This helps in studying the growth pattern of the company via emails marketing. If you have relevant content and high open rates, the engagement rates will rise, resulting in a higher growth rate.
7. Engagement over time
Engagement analysis in email marketing should not be overlooked. It helps in assessing day-to-day progress by checking whether the content being delivered is relevant and engaging or not.
It helps understand which hours of the day bring out maximum output and which day of the week is most suitable for sending emails.
It is seen that Fridays are considered the best days for email marketing. On the other hand, Saturdays are the worst day with the least open rates in email marketing.
This engagement analysis can help make our content, timing, and target align with our objective. It helps in understanding consumer behavior that is specifically for a particular company.
Conclusion
Email marketing can not be understood overnight. It demands hands-on experience in day-to-day professional life with different marketing campaigns. Personal experience can help in better optimization of movements according to the company’s requirements.
Along with experience, one must also ensure these Email Marketing Benchmarks to examine your campaigns and their success better.
The terminologies of the jargons used in email marketing analysis hold significant importance. Understanding the jargon before diving into the ocean of email marketing is a must to swim out and ace the never-ending ocean.
One must also keep themselves updated with the ever-changing world to get the best results from the given methods by using permutation and a combination of various techniques and email marketing benchmarks used in email marketing.
There is never a right or a wrong method for email marketing. The methods are either relevant or irrelevant depending on where they are used.
So dive into the ocean of email marketing and find your suitable method based on your requirements and business and gain the maximum out of email marketing.
Last Updated on by Laveleena Sharma