Email benchmarks: measuring up and tuning up

Benchmark studies can also be your best friend when you need to up your email-marketing game, says Silverpop's VP for industry relations, Loren McDonald

Silverpop's new 2015 Email Marketing Benchmark Study measures actions on email messages sent from more than 750 companies worldwide, representing nearly 3,000 brands in 17 industry verticals.

On Thursday 12th August I'll go over the numbers and call out UK-specific results during a DMA webinar, "Email Marketing Benchmarks: How Do You Measure Up?".

Benchmark study background

The study reports mean and median results on metrics such as unique open and click rates, opens per openers/clicks per clicker and click-to-open rate and list-churn indicators including bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints.

It also slices the data several ways to help you get more meaningful insights:

• Global regions: UK marketers fared better in some cases than marketers in four other country groupings: the United States, Canada, Europe/the Middle East/Africa and Asia-Pacific countries.
• Industry verticals: We grouped comparable industries together and found significant differences, especially on open- and click-related metrics.
• Top and bottom quartiles: You get more value by comparing your own program to your top competitors. (Our motto is "'Average' is the new bottom"). So, we also report on how the top and bottom 25 percent of brands performed on specific metrics. You'll see some eye-popping differences.

Sneak peek at the stats:

You'll have to tune into the webinar to get the big numbers (or download the study and get a jump on your fellow marketers), but I'll share a couple of teasers here:

1. Who gets more opens? The overall median open rate was 41.3%. But travel companies scored higher than retailers (23% to 16.1%). In the top quartile, travel ranked number one at 56.7% while retail ranked 16th of 17 verticals at 33.8%.

Cadence, calls to action, the aspirational aspect of travel versus the daily-deal drumbeat of retail – these factors contribute to the differential. Knowing this, retailers could add an aspirational aspect that sells the dream as well as the deal.

2. Transactional emails rock: Open rates on transactional emails more than doubled nontransactional: mean, 44.9% to 21.08%; median, 45.9% to 17.3%; and top quartile, 72.2% to 40.8%. Click rates are correspondingly high as well.

3. CTOR as a more precise metric: The click-to-open rate, which reports clicks as a percentage of opens, was 9.4%; meaning about one in 10 openers also clicked a link in the email. In the top quartile, the CTOR was 28.7% overall, with some sectors approaching 30%.

Turn numbers into action

During the webinar I'll share tips that can help you boost your open and click rates and reduce list churn. Afterwards, use the benchmark numbers to identify and shore up weaknesses in your whole programme. See which email or marketing-automation features your vendors offer but you don't use. Then, lobby for more budget resources to upgrade and improve your email programme.