E-Mail Marketing Benchmarks

Feb 20, 2009 by Mark Maier

Today Sean shared with me a letter from one of our properties asking about typical e-mail marketing metrics.  I found some fairly interesting statistics about what you can expect when you send out an e-mail, depending upon if it is business to business or E-commerce driven that I share with you as they could help you and your clients determine if a campaign is working and what they can realistically expect.  Please note that several companies offer "guides" that list these rates by industry and niche, the "guides" start at over $350.00 per issue and go up from there depending on the detail you are looking for. These EMail Marketing Statistics and Metrics from EMailLabs should give you and your clients a pretty good baseline...

"Sample Click-To-Open Rates

Open and click-through rates, the most commonly used and benchmarked email marketing metrics, provide marketers with a quick and reasonably accurate snapshot of how an email message performed. By combining these two metrics into the click-to-open rate, however, marketers have an additional and perhaps better tool to analyze and benchmark email performance.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is simply the ratio of unique clicks as a percentage of unique opens. The CTOR measures how effective your email message was in motivating recipients who opened it, to then click a link. In other words, the click-to-open rate expresses the measure of click-through rates as a percentage of messages opened, instead of messages delivered.

Click-To-Open Rates

Email Sample B2B Newsletter Ecommerce Email ISP/Domain Open CTR CTOR Open CTR CTOR AOL 12.0% 3.2% 26.7% 14.4% 8.2% 56.9% Earthlink 42.1% 2.6% 6.2% 47.4% 14.6% 30.8% Hotmail 30.0% 7.5% 25.0% 24.8% 8.9% 35.9% Yahoo! 21.2% 5.8% 27.4% 23.5% 9.2% 39.1% All Other Domains 42.5% 10.6% 24.9% 40.9% 11.2% 27.4% Total 39.6% 9.9% 25.0% 33.6% 10.9% 32.4% Variance: Low-High 30.5% 8.0% 21.2% 33.0% 6.4% 29.5% Source: EmailLabs

• The CTOR's greatest value may be as a diagnostic tool for email messages. For example, if you compare the CTOR across ISPs, key domains or customer segments you might uncover potential issues or trends that need to be addressed. Looking at the chart above, the Ecommerce Email CTOR for the AOL domain is clearly out of line with the rest of the domains. The click-through rate of 8.2% is not far below the average for the message, but the open rate is well below the average. This would strongly suggest that the actual open rate for the AOL segment is much higher. In this case, the low reported open rate is probably due to a combination of text emails and blocked images.
• As you can see in the chart above, the CTOR varied very little, 25%-27% (excluding Earthlink), while open and click-through rates varied widely. In this case, regardless of ISP (again excluding Earthlink), about one-fourth of recipients who opened the newsletter also clicked on a link. So despite wide variances in open and click-through rates, this message actually motivated most all recipient segments to click at the same rate. Additionally, the overall CTOR for this message was 25 percent as compared to an historical average for this newsletter of 26 percent.
• Learn more about the CTOR in the article Click-to-Open Rate: A Better Metric?

Wednesday is "Opening Day"

In the first three quarters of 2003, Wednesday was the most popular day for opening emails, followed by Tuesday. In Q3, 62.1% of emails were opened between Tuesday and Thursday, while only 9.1% were opened on weekends.

Wednesday's open popularity is clearly driven by the "hangover effect" and results from nearly 48.7% of messages being sent on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesdays recipients will open emails sent that day as well as the emails from Tuesday, the day they most likely received the highest number in their inbox. It is interesting to note that a significantly higher percentage of emails are opened on the weekends, than are sent by email marketers on Saturday and Sunday.

Open Days

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Q3 2003 4.1% 15.1% 19.6% 22.8% 19.7% 13.7% 5.0% Q2 2003 3.9% 13.3% 20.7% 22.0% 21.5% 14.3% 4.3% Q1 2003 4.0% 13.8% 18.6% 22.2% 21.5% 15.4% 4.5%

Poor Rendering Creates 'Disappointing Dialogue?

A sizable percentage of business and consumer email marketers fail to connect with their readers because they still send out email messages that do not render correctly, either because of blocked images or nonfunctioning links, according to an Email Experience Council study of 1,000 business and consumer mailings sent in the fourth quarter of 2006. Poor rendering hurts relevance and brand identity and creates a "dialogue that disappoints," according to Andy Goldman, OgilvyOne.

21%: Percentage of business and consumer email messages that showed up completely blank when images were turned off in email clients; most of these emails were promotional in nature and sent to drive sales

28%: Percentage of email messages sent with nonfunctioning links; spread equally over business and consumer mailings and prevalent within product-related, event and acquisition-based emails

Source: "The 2007 Rendering Report," published January 2007, the Email Experience Council

How Relevance Boosts Campaign Performance

Campaigns that target based on Web-site user clickstream data generate conversion rates that outperform untargeted broadcast campaigns by nearly 4 to 1, according to a recent Jupiter Research report promoting use of targeting devices beyond basic personalization and segmentation.

How targeting affects campaign performance:

Untargeted broadcast emails
Open rate: 20%
Avg. CTR: 9.5%
Avg. conversion rate: 1.1%

User-triggered campaigns
Open rate: 27%
Avg. CTR: 9.3%
Avg. conversion rate: 2.3%

Lifecycle messaging campaigns
Open rate: 26%
Avg. CTR: 9.3%
Avg. conversion rate: 2.3%

Clickstream-based campaigns
Open rate: 33%
Avg. CTR: 14%
Avg. conversion rate: 3.9%

Source: David Daniels, Jupiter Research.

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