As a small business owner, you probably don’t have a huge budget. Many of you may even be laughing at the combination of the words “huge” and “budget.” And even though you may be leveraging email marketing for your business, you probably don’t have the luxury of hiring a team of experts that can guide your sends and optimize the inbox experience.
So here’s some specific email data that can put your email programs on the right path.
2019 Email Marketing Benchmarks—by Industry and by Day
Campaign Monitor recently published a report on email marketing benchmarks. To get this data, Campaign Monitor analyzed over 30 billion emails from 4.2 million campaigns sent through their email service by more than 20 industries in 2018.
Here are some of the things that Campaign Monitor found out.
- Industries with the highest open rates
- Nonprofit Organizations – 20.39%
- Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting – 20.13%
- Government – 19.79%
- Healthcare – 19.12%
- Others – 18.94%
- Industries with the highest click-to-open rates
- Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting – 18.03%
- Media, Entertainment, and Publishing – 17.15%
- Real Estate, Design, and Construction Activities – 16.47%
- Unknown – 15.52%
- Government – 15.11%
- Industries with the highest unsubscribe rates
- Automotive and Aerospace – 0.22%
- Real Estate Agents and Brokers – 0.22%
- Logistics – 0.20%
- Advertising and Marketing Agencies, Construction, Contracting, and Manufacturing, and Engineering, Architecture, and Design – 0.19%
- Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting – 0.18%
- Industries with the highest bounce rates
- Construction, Contracting, and Manufacturing – 1.51%
- Logistics – 1.40%
- Other – 1.39%
- Education – 1.35%
- Financial Services, and Engineering, Architecture, and Design – 1.30%
- Best days to send emails
- Day with the highest open rate – Thursday
- Day with the highest click rate – Saturday
- Day with the lowest unsubscribe rate – Sunday or Monday
- Day with the lowest bounce rate – Monday
- Worst days to send emails
- Day with the lowest open rate – Sunday
- Day with the highest unsubscribe rate – Wednesday
- Day with the lowest click rate – Monday
- Day with the highest bounce rate – Friday
The importance of email marketing benchmarks
Knowing about email marketing benchmarks across a wide variety of industries allows you to gauge your own email success. By seeing how your emails perform compared to others, you can determine whether your programs are below or above industry standards. It will also be easier for you to see which areas of your email marketing strategy need improvement.
How to improve your email marketing
Regardless of how your emails are doing compared to your own industry’s standards as well as other industries’ standards, you can always make improvements. Here are some simple yet effective email tweaks you can do immediately.
1. Open rate
Your open rate refers to the percentage of recipients who open an email.
The best way to increase open rates is by making the best first impression possible via your subject lines. Craft subject lines that encourage subscribers to open your emails by using words proven to increase email opens. Include phrases such as “get this now,” “on sale now,” “voucher,” and “today only.”
Your email address should also contain your name, or at least a name or address that’s familiar to your audience. Fostering familiarity and trust between you and your customers is essential to increasing opens.
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
Email click-through rate is the percentage of recipients who click on an image or link included in your message. It’s generally used to measure engagement with a specific campaign.
The first thing you have to do to improve your click rates is to optimize your emails for mobile so they’ll render perfectly across a wide range of devices. You should also segment your list to ensure that the images or links you include are relevant to each of your subscriber segments.
3. Unsubscribe rate
An unsubscribe is when a subscriber chooses not to receive more emails and opts out of your list. Subscribers who take this action are often disinterested with the content of your emails, or may be receiving too many emails from you.
To prevent subscribers from becoming disinterested and opting out, segment your list. Doing so enables you to send content that your subscribers find relevant and compelling. You can also run a re-engagement campaign to try and regain subscribers who’ve previously opted out.
4. Bounce rate
A bounce occurs when your email fails to be delivered. There are several reasons for this, but they all into two categories: 1) soft bounces, and 2) hard bounces.
Soft bounces are temporary failures. These occur because the recipient’s inbox was full at the time of sending, or the email file was too large for the recipient’s current inbox capacity, or the recipient’s email client was experiencing a server error.
Meanwhile, hard bounces are permanent failures. These happen because the recipient’s email was invalid, the domain is no longer active, or you’ve been blocked by a specific service provider.
Between these two, you only really have to watch out for hard bounces because they negatively affect your reputation as a sender.
Avoid bounces by only sending to recipients who have opted in to your list. This means you should never purchase email lists from third parties.
5. Spam rate
Spam rate is the percentage of recipients who mark your email as spam. More often than not, subscribers do this when they can’t unsubscribe or have tried to unsubscribe but were unsuccessful.
To avoid your emails getting marked as spam, make it easy for your subscribers to opt out. Make the unsubscribe link in your email highly visible and easily found.
Wrap up
Armed with concrete email marketing data and steps to improve, you’re ready to elevate your email marketing. Once you’ve made the necessary changes to your emails, you can determine how effective these changes are by testing and monitoring performance. Utilize A/B tests to consistently improve your campaigns, and watch as your programs exceed the industry benchmarks.
If you want a more detailed view of how your industry stacks up against other industries in terms of email performance, check out Campaign Monitor’s Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2019.
