Benchmarking reports - useful or irrelevant?

As part of the wider changes the DMA is undertaking we on the Email Council are also questioning and evolving, ensuring we stay relevant to the needs of members and how we can best promote the email channel.

For many years one of the cornerstone outputs of the DMA Email Council has been the benchmarking reports. However, in the spirit of never accepting 'because we have always done it that way' there has recently been a lot of debate about the future of these reports.

Do we need benchmarks? Are they useful in their current form? Should benchmarks be compared to an industry average or to a particular organisations past performance? How can we help DMA members track benchmarks against their past performance? Should we be concentrating more on overall budgets and trends or the hard numbers (opens, clicks, bounces)? What aspects of benchmarking are meaningful and significant and should form the core of the insight we produce?

We are now looking at making a number of changes to the reports, but before we did we wanted to know what the wider email community thought and encompass as broad a perspective as possible.

As a reminder you can click here to see a recent report.

So please do take this opportunity to have your say and take a few moments to complete our very short survey!