in Email Marketing by Ambuj Tayal

2019 Email Marketing Insights and Benchmarks: Industry Wise

Digital technology has come up with a whole new array of opportunities for B2B lead generation channels for companies and brands. And one of the most effective tools of generating B2B leads is Email Marketing campaigns. But it’s not necessary that every B2B lead generation email marketing campaign could produce a plethora of top-notch prospects in your Sales Funnel. Now the definition of Lead generation has become – bringing the right prospects to your sales funnel. So it has become important to strategize well and set an email marketing benchmarks. As it will help you in –

  • Providing crucial information about the health of your campaigns
  • Seeing how your campaigns compare to industry standards
  • Finding opportunities to improve your strategy, thus getting better results

Being the leading B2B service providers, we at SalesAladin, have worked on millions of e-Mail campaigns. And while working on those campaigns we found really interesting insights. So sharing our 2019 findings for email marketing benchmarks by industry, which are solely based on our experience of Customer Campaign emails. Let’s have a look at them:

So above we have shared the finding that we analyzed through our campaigns. Now let’s understand the key Email marketing metrics and know the key factors that can help us improve those metrics –

Email open rate

It’s basically the percentage of a total number of users/subscribers who opened an email campaign. It plays an important role in the analysis and understanding the bench-marking metrics. Email Open rates can vary depending on the targeting, subject line relevancy of the subject matter and most importantly Subject line.

As per our finding open rate varies from 16.8%. Let’s see how to improve these email open rate –

  • Work on Subject lines
  • Subject line length, content and tone
  • Optimize the Subject lines for previews and pre-header text
  • Ensure you have relevant content that should be personalized and segmented
  • Test a few crucial factors – sender name, email address, send day, send time, and send cadence

Email click-through rate

The email click-through rate is the total number of subscribers who clicked on the link or image attached in your email. It should be smaller than your click-to-open rate. Click through rate provides an insight into how many subscribers are visiting your website, thus you can target them to ultimately convert through email. By comparing your open rates, click-to-open rates, and your click-through rates, weakest email marketing campaign could be figured out.

As per our finding click-through rate varies from 2.95%.  Let’s see how to improve your click-through rate:

  • Always create stronger segments and send the aptest and relevant content.
  • Maintain your brand messaging in throughout the email content.
  • Improve your CTA (call-to-action) through clear messaging and captivating design.
  • Offer clear and strong incentives to completely capture subscribers’ attention.
  • A/B test – as it always works.
  •  Always ensure that the subject line should match with the content of your emails.

Unsubscribe rate

It’s an action a user takes in order to not get any more emails. This is an important metrics to analyze for every campaign in order to check if your subject lines and email content are capable of driving up the unsubscribe number. It’s an indicator that shows unhappy or disinterested audience.

As per our finding unsubscribe rate is almost 0.19%. Let’s see how to improve your Unsubscribe rate:

  • Create a healthy set of target audiences right from the start
  • Leverage pioneering tools and use automation in order to build long-term and good brand engagement
  • Segment your audience wisely in order to send relevant and targeted emails
  • Properly re-engage your audience and keep the list hygienic

Email click-to-open rate

It’s a percentage of email viewers – those who open an email and those who click on links or images available in an email. The email click-to-open rate is the measure of the immediate response rate of an email. Email click-to-open rate is a key metric, which is used to measure the success rate of a specific email campaign.

As per our analysis, an average email click-to-open rate is 13.92%. Let’s see how to improve your email click rate:

  • Ensure that your email renders well across all the devices
  • Collect the apt and right data in order to properly personalize and do the segmentation
  • Optimize your email design well and then copy
  • Imbibe an irresistible, and easy-to-click call to action
  • Properly A/B test each email individually
  • And automate your emails wisely in order to figure out what is working and what’s not

Spam rate

Email spam is also termed as junk mail. Even it sometimes includes phishing links from the available websites that host viruses and malware. Sometimes these emails are sent in bulk quantities, while sometimes it appears as unsought, commercial emails. The spam rate is when the recipients mark your emails as spam, which is solely based on ISPs & ESPs reports, which are properly maintained via a defined path. As per our analysis campaign monitor emails have almost rate of 0.003 %. Spam rate. Let’s see how to improve your Spam rate:

  • Try to have a familiar Senders (‘From’) name so that subscribers can recognize you well
  • Never send from the email addresses like ‘noreply@company.com’
  • Only send email to those people who have permitted to email them
  • Use a business-configured domain for sending emails
  • And always avoid using spam-like content and formats

 Email bounce rate

Bounced emails are emails that couldn’t be delivered. Majorly it’s an explanation of delivery failure, which the majority occurs due to the server or spam issues. And these issues could be permanent or temporary. Typically, the bounce rate is a key metric, which is the calculation of a percentage of subscribers who have not received messages. Basically, there are two types of bounces – Hard and Soft. As per our analysis average bounce rate is 1.02%. Let’s see How to improve your Email Bounce rate:

  • Update your lists regularly and discard the old list
  • Never buy lists
  • Eradicate invalid email addresses
  • Don’t use free webmail addresses
  • Don’t use spam content
  • Use suppression techniques to reduce bounces

Email Deliverability

It’s an ability to properly deliver emails to the subscribers. It’s a key metrics for some marketers, who use to analyze the likelihood of their email campaigns and reach their subscribers’ inboxes.  Issues like ISPs, bounces, throttling, spam issues, and bulking may hamper your deliver ability, thus reducing the number of your emails that will land to your subscribers’ inboxes.

That’s why deliver-ability plays a crucial role in everything right from the open to click to spam reports. Hence, working on it will have a huge impact on the email marketing campaign’s success.  Let’s see how to improve email deliver-ability:

  • Use custom authentication for sending
  • Try to use double opt-in rather than single
  • Always make it easy to unsubscribe
  • Don’t use URL shorteners
  • Avoid sending through a free domain email address
  • Never send emails with a large number of images

How to use benchmarks to improve your Email Marketing?

Benchmarks are an important part to evaluate how your own email program is working as compared to industry standards. And they have the capability to establish a baseline for knowing and figuring out how and what to improve. But we also recommend using your experience and past results as the benchmark. And it is the easiest way to determine what success looks like for your company or brand. Let’s take a look at a few questions that you should ask before planning your email campaign –

  • Is traffic improving as your list continues to grow, or its declining as your list is becoming fatigued?
  • How much actual revenue or site traffic you are driving with each email? This will help you in figuring out the areas that need improvements.
  • And, finally, the best method for optimizing your results and figuring out the areas to improve is – Testing, so test, test, and test again and again!

Hope you find the metrics and points covered in the email interesting. We keep updating our posts and data, so stay tuned and connected with us on our social channels- FB, LinkedIn & Twitter.