Email Marketing Benchmarks: What Are Good Email Marketing Engagement Rates?
If you aren’t sure whether or not your email marketing is working, you aren’t alone. Many brands and organizations wonder whether or not their email is hitting the mark. And while there is no exact standard for success, you can get a good idea of how well you’re doing by looking at email marketing benchmarks.
What’s an Email Marketing Benchmark?
An email marketing benchmark is a standard that allows you to rate the success of an email marketing campaign. Benchmarks can help you see how your campaigns compare to others and how you should set your own internal goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Many email marketing benchmarks come from average metrics shared by email marketing providers. Email marketing providers are able to collect immense amounts of data as brands use their platform to send emails. These metrics are great places to start as you look for email marketing benchmarks.
What’s a Good Email Engagement Rate?
There are a few things to keep in mind before we jump into email marketing benchmarks. If you want to get accurate metrics to measure your email marketing engagement rates, consider these three things.
1. Look at all email marketing metrics. To measure email marketing engagement, look at a few different metrics. Track your:
- Open Rate
- Click-through Rate (CTR)
- Click-to-open Rate (CTOR)
- Bounce Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
- Conversion Rate
Later in this post, we’ll dive into the definitions and benchmarks for each of these email engagement metrics as reported by:
2. Consider your industry. This guide will share average email marketing benchmarks across all industries. These metrics are useful, but they are not as useful as metrics that are directly related to your industry. When setting standards for your own email marketing performance, seek data that is specifically tied to your industry.
3. Consider your own data. Don’t rely on average email marketing benchmarks forever. Use those metrics as a starting point to set your goals and KPIs. Then as you send more and more email marketing campaigns on your own, collect your own data and begin to use those numbers to shape your goals.
Related: 45 Email Marketing Ideas to Inspire Your Next Campaign
Email Marketing Benchmarks
To measure the success of your email marketing, consider these six engagement rates and benchmarks.
Open Rate
What’s an open rate? An open rate is the percentage of emails that are opened by recipients.
What can you learn from an open rate? Open rate is often an indicator of subject line quality and performance. Writing a compelling subject line usually leads to more opens and higher open rates.
What’s a good open rate for emails? The average open rate across all industries was reported by email marketing providers as:
- HubSpot: 20.94%
- GetResponse: 18.13%
- MailChimp: 21.5%
- Campaign Monitor: 21.33%
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
What’s a click-through rate? Click-through rate is the percentage of people who received your email and clicked on a link.
What can you learn from a click-through rate? Click-through rate can help you determine how well your overall email strategy is working. To increase click-through rates, you may need to try audience segmentation, improve email copy and design, simplify call-to-actions, or send emails at different times.
What’s a good click-through rate (CTR)? The click-through rate across all industries was reported by email marketing providers as:
- HubSpot: 7.8%
- GetResponse: 2.41%
- MailChimp: 2.62%
- Campaign Monitor: 2.3%
Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)
What’s a click-to-open rate? A click-to-open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked on a link.
What can you learn from a click-to-open rate? Click-to-open rates can specifically help you rate how well your email content is performing. It indicates how many people opened your email and then clicked on the content. So if click-to-open rates are low, you know you are losing people once they open the email.
What’s a good click-to-open rate?
- GetResponse: 13.31%
- Campaign Monitor: 10.5%
Unsubscribe Rate
What’s an email unsubscribe rate? Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who receive your email and ask to unsubscribe or not receive future emails.
What can you learn from an unsubscribe rate? An unsubscribe rate can help you assess the health of your email list. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, you likely have the wrong people on your list. Unsubscribe rates can also offer insight into how often you send emails and if it is turning off your audience.
What’s a good unsubscribe rate?
- Hubspot: 0.48%
- GetResponse: 0.1%
- MailChimp: 0.26%
- Campaign Monitor: 0.1%
Related: 7 Simple Ways to Collect Your Customer's Contact Information
Bounce Rate
What’s a bounce rate? A bounce rate is the percentage of emails that you send that do not reach the inbox of recipients on your list.
What can you learn from a bounce rate? Bounce rate is another indicator of the health of your list. If you have a high bounce rates, it could be that users didn’t sign up with the correct information. It also could be a sign that there is an issue with your email marketing software or that an email provider has started to see your content as low-quality or spammy.
What’s a good bounce rate?
- HubSpot: 0.63%
- MailChimp: 0.49% (average of soft and hard bounces)
Email Conversion Rate
What’s an email conversion rate? A conversion is defined by whatever goal you set for a specific email. For example, it may be someone buying something or a customer setting an appointment after receiving your email.
What can you learn from a conversion rate? A conversion rate can help you get a look at your email marketing campaign as a whole. You should set a goal for each email you send (such as driving sales or leading to registrations). Your conversion rate will help you see how effective your overall strategy is from subject line and email copy to your offers and messaging.
What’s a good conversion rate? An email conversion rate isn’t necessarily tracked by email marketing software so there aren’t benchmarks for this metric as provided by email software companies. Use a customer data platform to set these goals and track them on your end.
Related: How to Create a Restaurant Email Marketing Strategy
Improve Your Email Marketing Engagement Rates
When you don’t know how to measure email marketing engagement rates, these benchmarks will help.
Start measuring your success by comparing your results to these average email marketing benchmarks. Then, continue to refine your numbers to set new goals that align with your industry, list size, and unique customer base.
If you need help improving your email marketing metrics, let’s talk. MyArea Network has proven strategies for boosting email engagement. See how we can help you create more strategic, higher performing email campaigns. Schedule a call with our team today.
