Benchmark Blues and why the lack of them can be worse

This blog is written by Marcus Geary who sits on the Email Council.

Benchmarking is not easy. Benchmarking can be painful - and that’s without even mentioning the experience of helping to put together this year’s Email Benchmarking report.

Personal benchmarking is arguably at the heart of what psychologist Oliver James called Affluenza - what most people would term Keeping Up With The Jones’. It makes people think their house is too small, car too slow and clothes out-of-date. In extreme circumstances, benchmarking against one’s peers can lead to anxiety and depression: failing to live the life one feels one should have. Benchmarking is the harshest type of comparison: focusing exclusively on excellence and reflecting it back at the comparer.

The DMA’s benchmarking report could cause you some pain therefore. Open and click rates might be higher, might be significantly higher than for your own company or clients. Or maybe you didn’t think you had deliverability issues or your unsubscribe rate was sustainable but there it is in black and white: you’re doing worse in your sector than the standard and you’re the person responsible. 3 months on from its publication you may still be suffering palpitations therefore.

On the other hand, the opposite reaction – complacency – can be similarly ruinous. Pleased at your above average engagement it would be easy – perhaps – to rest on your laurels.

At the risk of doing the report out of its own job, “benchmarking” is perhaps a misnomer. At its publication I hinted that these figures should be seen as a low rather than high bar. Ultimately we are aggregating the responses of the ESPs we could find to contribute to the report – which is by no means the entire market – and it would be, (shock horror), not the greatest surprise to discover that some of the clients of these ESPs don’t always follow best practice.

One of the constant themes of Council meetings is how to do joined-up research. The benchmarking report should no more be seen in isolation from the DMA’s Marketer or Consumer reports as Opta Sports analytics tells you all you need to know about how your football team did without also consulting the match report and the fans' 6-0-6 phone-in. Each might give you an idea of how well the team is doing but only all 3 will get you anything like a complete view.

Similarly, you might think your 3% Retail click rate means you’re performing better than average but when you know (from the Marketer report) that Marketers struggle with even the basics of testing, segmentation and analysis maybe you’re forgetting what you could be achieving?

Equally, whilst (your client’s) open rate may be strong is it holding up or declining? The Consumer Email report highlighted that 60% of the respondents thought no brand did email well whilst 2 in 5 wanted to reduce the number of emails they were getting. They may be opening but are they engaging? Are they actually getting bored of your brand without giving you the metrics to show it?

So whether you were left smug or floored by the benchmarking report the important thing is to get a rounded view of the data. Join the dots using the rest of the DMA’s research output and most importantly, don’t assume you’ve done the job just because you’ve hit the benchmark otherwise you may find come next year’s report you’ve fallen short.