How To Use Email Marketing Benchmarks For Your Email Campaign Reports

Like every email marketer, you want to understand whether your email marketing campaigns are driving outcomes for your business - whether that's driving more email engagement, more conversions, or more sales, you're always looking to generate better results.

But what's better? What's good in the first place? What's bad?

Enter email marketing benchmarks.

What is a benchmark?

A benchmark helps you determine whether your email marketing campaigns are successful or unsuccessful.

Benchmarks are simply standards by which you can look at your email marketing KPIs (click rate, conversion rate, delivery rate, etc.) for a particular campaign and determine whether the campaign performed better or worse than that standard.

Why use email Marketing benchmarks?

Simply put, it's a tool to help you quickly determine whether your email marketing campaign performed well or not!

There's no need to guess whether a 3.1% click rate is good, bad, or ugly - comparing this click rate vs. a benchmark will help you determine this information and help you make improvements to your email marketing program.

Email marketing benchmarks help give you context in your email campaign reports - without them, you're staring at a wall of data wondering what's working and what's not!

Where can I find benchmarks for my email marketing reports?

There are two primary places to find email marketing benchmarks

1. Using Your Own Email Marketing Data: You can calculate your own benchmarks based on your email marketing campaign performance.

2. Using Industry Email Marketing Data: This valuable data can help you determine whether your email marketing campaigns are successful (or unsuccessful) based on how others in your industry are performing.

WHICH Type of Email marketing Benchmark is most useful?

Using your own email marketing data is by far the most useful type of email marketing benchmark to use for several reasons

1. Control benchmark definitions: you can use your own data to calculate benchmarks - there's no question for how benchmarks are calculated or defined - unlike Industry Email Marketing benchmarks.

2. Show how your campaign performs vs. campaigns previously sent to your EXACT audience: when you want to understand how your subscribers respond to your email marketing campaigns vs. other campaigns you've sent to your subscribers, you have all the data at your fingertips to do so! Using Industry Email Marketing benchmarks doesn't allow you to see how your subscribers engage with email campaigns.

3. Truly understand whether your email campaigns are performing better: there's only one way to tell if your email marketing campaigns are performing better - comparing performance against your previous performance.

What are common email marketing benchmarks if I use my own email marketing data?

Common benchmarks you can calculate using your own data include.

1. Week-To-Date (WTD): identify average KPI performance for the current week's email marketing campaigns.

2. Last-Week (LW): identify average KPI performance for last week's email marketing campaigns.

3. Month-To-Date (MTD) identify average KPI performance for the current month's email marketing campaigns.

4. Last-Month (LM): identify average KPI performance for last month's email marketing campaigns.

5. Year-To-Date (YTD): identify average KPI performance for the current year's email marketing campaigns.

6. Last Year (LY): identify average KPI performance for last year's email marketing campaigns.

7. Campaign Type Benchmarks: there will be scenarios where you want to simply compare two campaign types against one another because they are very similar types of content. For example, if you run a yearly Black Friday promotion, you may want to compare Black Friday campaigns engagement from this year vs. last year's Black Friday campaigns.

Which email marketing benchmarks are best to use IF I USE MY OWN Email marketing data?

It depends on how you're looking to view email marketing campaign performance. Generally speaking, here's a few tips for why you would use each email marketing benchmark:

1. Use weekly benchmarks (email campaign performance vs. WTD & LW) to compare short-term performance improvements (or declines).

2. Use monthly benchmarks (email campaign performance vs. MTD & LM) to compare mid-term performance improvements (or declines).

3. Use yearly benchmarks (email campaign performance vs. YTD & LY) to compare long-term performance improvements (or declines).

HOW DO I START USING MY OWN EMAIL MARKETING BENCHMARKS?

Simple! In your email campaign report, identify a campaign you want to dive deeper on performance.

Let's say you own a local retailer and are looking to identify whether your email marketing campaign you deployed a few days ago has shown improvement in click rate vs. campaigns deployed last week (LW).

Here's the steps you can take to identify whether your campaign showed improvement or not.

1). Identify your KPI performance for your chosen email marketing campaign:

3.1% click rate

2). Identify your KPI performance for campaigns deployed last week (LW)

2.7% click rate

3). Calculate the difference in performance between your selected email marketing campaigns and LW campaigns

Campaign Performance vs. Last Week (LW) =

(Click Rate for Campaign - Click Rate for Campaigns LW) /

Click Rate for Campaign

(3.1% click rate- 2.7% click rate) /

3.1% click rate

Campaign Performance vs. Last Week (LW) = 12.9%

4). Translate the results into an insight

To make all this math useful, we need to translate these numbers into insights, or statements that allow us to understand what occurred. Based on the math above, I would translate this into the following insight

My email marketing campaign deployed a few days ago produced a 12.9% improvement in click rate (3.1% vs. 2.7%) vs. last week's campaigns. My email marketing campaigns are doing a better job of getting subscribers to click through my content.

5). Take action

Now it's time to take action on your insights! You want to continue the positive momentum for producing higher click rates on your email marketing campaigns (or stop the negative momentum if you saw poor results). It's time to dig deeper into what helped you produce an improvement in your email campaign performance.

The primary question you should be asking yourself is

What was different about my email marketing campaign vs. campaigns

included in my benchmark?

You're looking to identify reasons why your email marketing campaign performed the way it did. It's time to dive deeper into your email marketing campaign to understand:

• Did the campaign target different subscribers vs. campaigns included in my benchmark?

• Did the campaign include different copy or tone vs. campaigns included in my benchmark?

• Did the campaign include different creative treatment vs. campaigns included in my benchmark?

• Did the campaign include different offers or promotions vs. campaigns included in my benchmark?

WHAT IF I'M SCARED OF MATH AND FORMULAS?

Calculating these common email marketing benchmarks is relatively simple math. If you're ok with some division and multiplication, continue on!

HOWEVER, if you're scared of math and formulas - no sweat - pick up the ULTIMATE email marketing campaign dashboard where all of these benchmarks are calculated for you using your own email marketing data - and WAY more.

Using industry email marketing benchmarks

What Do I need to watch out for using industry Email Marketing Benchmarks?

Industry Definitions

To make industry email marketing benchmarks more useful, email marketing software providers classify client email marketing engagement data into various industries. Doing so allows you to understand whether your email marketing campaigns are successful in comparison to other campaigns deployed in your industry vertical.

However, there are some clear pitfalls in how industries are defined.

• Each email marketing software provider defines an industry subjectively. There is no standardized way for which companies are placed in specific industry definitions.

• Industry benchmarks are often provided in broad terms - for example, there will be industry benchmarks provided for "Restaurants". However there are LOTS of different types of restaurants. Is this a fast food restaurant or fine dining?

• Industry benchmarks may span multiple geographic areas (different countries, different regions, different cities, etc.). This can give you a less precise view into how subscribers in your industry niche and geography respond to similar email marketing campaigns.

KPI Definitions

Each industry email marketing benchmark report will generally speaking provide you with the most fundamental email marketing KPI benchmarks - open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, etc. However, each report may define each KPI in a slightly different way - particularly how open rates.

Measuring email marketing opens has changed forever thanks to new Apple data privacy features - for more, check out my post on how you should be pivoting away from measuring open rates.

WHERE CAN I FIND Industry Email Marketing Benchmarks?

Depending on the industry your company participates in, email marketing software providers often can provide email marketing benchmarks to you at no cost. I've provided links to some of my favorites below:

• GetResponse: Email Marketing Benchmarks

  • The most comprehensive benchmark report

  • Includes benchmarks for open rate, click rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, spam rate, and bounce rate

  • Provides a detailed overview of benchmarks by not only 18 different industries, but also 24 different countries! Benchmarks are even available by month (are holiday campaigns supposed to perform better than other time periods?), by day of week (when's the best day of week to maximize performance) and by hour of the day (when's the best time to send your campaigns to maximize performance?)

• Mailchimp: Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics by Industry

  • Includes benchmarks for open rate, click rate, hard bounce rate, soft bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate.

  • Provides benchmarks for 45 different industries.

• MailerLite: Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022

  • Includes benchmarks for open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate.

  • Provides benchmarks for 44 different industries.

• Klaviyo: Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry for Q1 2022

  • Includes benchmarks for open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and revenue per email - one of the few benchmark reports to include conversion rate and revenue KPIs!

  • Only includes benchmarks for 13 different industries - likely driven by Klaviyo primarily serving eCommerce email marketing programs.

• Campaign Monitor: Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry and Day

  • Includes benchmarks for open rate, click rate, click-to-open rate, and unsubscribe rate.

  • Provides benchmarks for 18 different industries - more generalized industry definitions than other industry reports.

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