Email Marketing Benchmarks in industry

Have you ever wondered how the open and click rates of your email campaigns compare to those of your competitors? Do your campaigns generate enough leads? And what is the quality/price ratio of your campaigns? In short, where do you stand relative to the sector average?

All these questions are perfectly legitimate. But as with any benchmark, it can be hard to find this kind of information on the web.

Most benchmarks are very general, and it is difficult to rank your own campaign statistics against such catch-all data when you are an industrial parts supplier, a software vendor or a 3D printing, prototyping and 3D scanner professional.

That is why we analyzed nearly 500 campaigns that we had run for our own customers – industrial parts suppliers, software vendors and additive manufacturing professionals – to give you some basis for comparison.

What counts as a good open rate in industry?

Across all sectors combined, a good open rate is generally between 15 and 25%.

Hubspot recently published an article looking at the rates of email marketing campaigns. On average, a good open rate in industry is 20%.

This figure needs to be put into perspective, however, because a good open rate will depend on several factors:

• The health of your email list
• The quality of your subject line
• The average for your company’s sector

Companies in the electronics sector, for example, are more likely to have an open rate of around 19%, while software companies will be around the 20% mark, and manufacturers closer to 23%.

In the study we have put together, you will see that the open rates of our customers’ campaigns vary from one region to another and especially according to the content they offer to the target.

What counts as a good click rate in industry?

According to Hubspot  once again, a good click rate – across all sectors – would be 7.8%.

However, according to an Plezi article covering 4 different studies of email marketing rates*, the average click rate in B2B is 3.06%.

Quite a difference, isn’t it?

Before giving you more details about the click rate, here’s a quick recap on how it is calculated:

Click rate = (number of clicks on a link in an email / number of emails delivered) x 100

The click rate is one of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that must be tracked to evaluate the effectiveness of an emailing campaign. If the click rate is high, it means that the content of the email is addressing the issues of your target audience.

Getting the right recipe for a good click rate depends on:

• The relevance of the content to your target
• The text-to-image ratio – 80% text to 20% image is ideal
• The effectiveness of the call to action (text, color, positioning)

* This figure is an average of 4 studies published in 2018 and 2019 by Mailchimp, IBM, Campaign Monitor and GetResponse.

What counts as a good click-through rate in industry?

Sometimes click rate and click-through rate get conflated. But click-through rate is a complementary metric to click rate.

Of all the KPIs, in fact, if we had to keep just one metric for analyzing email campaigns, this would be it! It corresponds to the ratio of the click rate over the open rate.

Here’s how it is calculated:

Click-through rate= (number of clicks on a link in an email / number of emails opened) x 100