Email Marketing Benchmarks You Need to Track in 2024

Are you ready to create emails that will leave your subscribers wanting more? Email marketing is increasingly important for sales and growth as a modern marketer. It’s one of the most reliable methods for staying close to customers over time. 

However, to stay ahead of the competition in 2024, you must understand what triggers action from your subscribers by tracking email marketing benchmarks. To ensure your campaigns are on track, keep reading to determine what metrics impact success.

What are Email Marketing Benchmarks?

Email marketing is an extremely versatile promotional tool widely used across industries. However, the range of possible outcomes suggests that the ideal benchmarks gauge success vary greatly. 

Email marketing benchmarks are crucial to an organization’s digital marketing initiatives. They provide a precise measure against which the success of individual campaigns can be judged and offer data to help create an overall strategy for maximum results and ROI. 

Typical email marketing benchmarks contain open rates, click-through rates, transaction rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and more. By creating baselines and tracking fluctuations within the given metrics over time, marketers can use this information to further refine their techniques to accomplish goals more efficiently.

Best Email Marketing Benchmarks

1. Open Rate

Email open rates are among the crucial email marketing benchmarks for email marketers. To determine your available rate for an email marketing campaign, divide the number of opens by the number of emails sent (subtracting the number of bounces). 

The average email open rate across industries is 17.8%. If your available rate is lower than that, it can be because of a few factors. Firstly, your subject lines must be more persuasive to tempt subscribers to click. 

To enhance your subject lines, you should keep them precise, punchy, and personalized. A subject line aims to pique the reader’s interest and promise something good should they open and read your email.

If you want to dig deeper into your open rates, you can look at total opens compared to unique opens. It tells you if a subscriber opened your email just once or if they went back to it a few times.

It is great information to use when considering where leads might be in their customer journey so you can match your message to the right stage of your marketing funnel.

2. Click-Through Rate

Your email click-through rate (CTR) shows the percentage of recipients who click on your email link. The average CTR across industries is 2.6%, as reported by the campaign monitor. You can evaluate it by dividing the number of recipients who clicked a link in your email by the number of emails you sent.

Many marketers comprehend CTR as the email marketing benchmark that allows them to decide if their content is intriguing, engaging, and compelling enough to get subscribers to click. Suppose you have a higher CTR; great! That indicates your calls-to-action (CTAs) are encouraging subscribers to action. 

3. Engagement Rates

The list of email marketing benchmarks would be complete without discussing engagement rates. Engagement is how long a reader remains on your email and engages with it, and it’s typically defined as the combination of three things: read, skimmed, and glanced.

If a reader spends more than 8 seconds on your email, that is considered “read.” If they spend 2–8 seconds on your email, they’ve “skimmed.” And, if a reader spends less than 2 seconds on your email, it’s considered “glanced.”

4. Reply Rates

Reply rates are among the most neglected email marketing benchmarks but are among the most significant. Your email reply rate is the number of subscribers who reply positively to a certain CTA. So, even with a ridiculously high open rate, your emails will lead to something other than sales if your reply rate is low.

According to Vance Plunkett( B2B Data Guy), the average reply rate for B2B businesses is between 5%–6%. This isn’t an earth-shattering number, but that’s mainly because some people will click on a link (improving your click-through rate) without replying.

5. Bounce Rate

Bounced emails are those emails that failed to be delivered. This could be spam, server issues, or temporary or permanent issues. Ultimately, the bounce rate is the percentage of subscribers who didn’t get your email because their email server rejected it.

There are two types: hard bounces and soft bounces. A hard bounce occurs when your email is rejected without being accepted by the recipient’s server. A soft bounce occurs when your email enters the recipient’s email server but is still returned as undelivered.

To estimate your email bounce rate, divide the number of undelivered emails by the number of emails sent. If you’re noticing high bounce rates, you have to ensure that your emails aren’t coming off as spam. 

There are several tools online that can support you in determining the spam score of your emails. In addition, you’ll have to ensure that your emails reach the right audience—another great reason to keep your email list clean.

6. Unsubscribe Rate

You can’t make everyone happy with your email marketing campaigns. So some of your emails will lead to unsubscribes, and that’s okay. 

But understanding your unsubscribe rate and which emails resulted in unsubscribes is the most helpful way to find out what’s working and what isn’t so you can make adjustments. 

To estimate your unsubscribe rate, divide the unsubscribe numbers by the number of emails sent (deducting bounces).  If you’re noticing high unsubscribe rates, there are a few things you should consider. 

Once again, the first thing to think about is your subject line. It must be short, exciting, and personalized if you want subscribers to care enough about your emails to stay subscribed.

Moreover, you also want to ensure you aren’t sending too many emails. It will largely depend on your audience’s wants, so we recommend you test different frequencies or ask your subscribers how they usually want to hear from you.

7. Deliverability Rates

This email marketing benchmark is all about deliverability. We’ve talked a little bit about deliverability already. 

Email deliverability helps you reach your emails into subscribers’ inboxes. It appears simplistic, but several things can keep your email from reaching its targeted audience; throttling, spam issues, bounces, ISP problems, and bulk emails can all decrease your deliverability.

This is a metric to monitor and recognize issues before they become severe.

8. Complaint Rates

Complaint rate is among the important email marketing benchmarks. It is the number of emails that your subscribers are reporting as spam. It doesn’t happen often, but tracking and understanding are still necessary. To measure your complaint rate, divide the number of complaints by the number of emails sent (deducting bounces).

When you get multiple complaints, you’re more likely to be labeled as spam by some big email services like Gmail. If you’re stuck with a “spam” label, getting your content out to your intended recipients will be very difficult, so make sure you track your complaint rates before it’s too late.

9. Number of CTAs

Deciding how many calls to action to include in your emails is a balancing act. On the one hand, you want to ensure your subscribers get your CTA. But conversely, you want to include only so many CTAs that your readers need to understand what’s happening. 

We recommend keeping your email marketing campaigns focused on a single goal. That means a single CTA. What is the most meaningful thing you want your subscribers to do when they read this email? That’s your CTA.

10. Click-to-Open Rate

While your email open rate counts every open, the click-to-open rate (CTOR) calculates unique clicks. So, if recipients open your email more than once, your open rate will count each of those opens individually. 

However, the CTOR estimates only one open for each recipient, no matter how many times that recipient opens your email. It’s computed by dividing the unique number of email clicks by the total number of emails sent. 

CTOR informs you how many recipients found your content valuable or relevant enough to them to cause them to click. If your click-to-open rate is low, look at your email campaign’s design. Is it easy to scan? Is it personalized and relevant? Dynamic content is a wonderful way to personalize emails without creating several emails for different segments. 

Conclusion

Knowing the email marketing benchmarks is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. These benchmarks show us what to strive for when designing and executing our plans and campaigns. Armed with this information, we can develop ideas that have a greater chance of success and ensure that we keep up with the times as email marketing changes. 

Also, having important numbers to track helps us become more conscious of our stats and how we can continue enhancing them. Finally, understanding the current benchmarks will help you better plan for the future of your business’s email marketing needs. 

NotifyVisitors ensures that you adhere to email marketing benchmarks and improve email campaign performance. If you want to know more about it, don’t forget to schedule a free demo.