Email plays a critical role in B2B marketing. We, as marketers, use it every day to engage our prospects and customers. We use it to share content, promote new products, and invite people to our sponsored events. While many of us track the performance of our emails, we are not always sure how we compare to industry averages. In this blog post, we share email performance benchmarks based on industry averages.
A quick Google search for “email benchmarks” will yield hundreds of results. While there is no shortage of information, it can take a while to sort through all of the results. This post distills email performance down to a simple 4×4 matrix. We consider email Opens, Clicks, Bounces, and Unsubscribes as the metrics and consider average and best-in-class performance for Prospects and Customers as the categories.
The data used to create these benchmarks comes from a combination of industry reports from companies like MailChimp, ConstantContact, Marketo, and Hubspot as well as the millions of emails that our customers have sent. Specifically, these benchmarks focus on email performance for B2B technology companies.
While this chart distills email performance down to simple metrics, it is worth noting that there are other factors to consider. Here are five factors that will affect your email performance.
- Industry – Each industry has a slightly different email performance. This is true for the industry of the marketer as well as the customer. For example, an email from a software company to a healthcare company will perform differently than an email from a professional service company to a manufacturer.
- Timing – Email performance is affected by the time and day an email was sent out. For example, emails sent at 8:30 AM on a Sunday morning are typically outperformed by emails sent at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday.
- Cadence – How often do people get your emails? If it is too frequent then you are likely to get an unsubscribe, or spam complaint. If it is not frequent enough, you will not build enough brand recognition to get people to interact with your email content, or be recognized as a legitimate sender.
- Volume – The volume of email refers to how many people are on your distribution list. It should be no surprise that email blasts to your entire database are outperformed by targeted emails to a smaller list. In addition, if you send too many emails to the same company you risk getting caught in spam filters.
- Content – Your content matters. If you are not sending relevant content you might get opens, but you will not get clicks. Dynamic content that is specified and triggered with automation outperforms generic messages. In the world of marketing automation, personalizing content for each customer or prospect makes a significant difference.
Email remains a critical component in our day-to-day marketing operations. Now that you have an industry benchmark, you can track your email performance through time and compare it to how others are doing in your industry. At ORM we specialize in marketing analytics to include email program performance and revenue attribution. If you have questions, or would like to discuss your email performance, please email us at info@orm-tech.com.
