Email Marketing Benchmarks

Email marketing benchmarks are metrics a business or organization uses to gauge the success of their email marketing efforts over time. Often, organizations study both internal benchmarks and industry-wide benchmarks for performance. These may change and evolve over time. Common email marketing benchmarks include open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounces, and unsubscribes.

Here’s a breakdown of what each email benchmark measures:

Email open rate: Email open rate is the percentage of the total number of subscribers who opened an email campaign.

Email click-through rate: The email click-through rate is the number of subscribers who click on a link or image in your email out of all the total emails you’ve sent, regardless of whether or not the subscriber opened the campaign. Your click-through rate will be smaller than your click-to-open rate since it’s calculated using the larger number of total emails (versus just those who have opened).

Email click-to-open rate: The email click-to-open rate is the percentage of email viewers (those that open an email) who click on a link or image within an email. The email click-to-open rate may be considered a measure of the immediate response rate of an email.

Unsubscribe rate: Unsubscribe is the action a user takes to opt-out of getting any more emails. The percentage of people who unsubscribe is often displayed as a reporting number on each email campaign you send.

Email bounce rate: A bounced email is an email that couldn’t be delivered. Specifically, it’s an explanation of delivery failure related to server or spam issues, whether these issues are permanent or temporary.

Email deliverability: Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes. It’s what some marketers use to gauge the likelihood of their email campaigns reaching their subscribers’ inboxes related to actual delivery.