Email Marketing Benchmarks – is Your Business Performing at its Peak?
About the Author: Noa Eshed
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Introduction – A tap into Email Marketing Benchmarks
Marketing data, statistics and benchmarks are essential for businesses to understand how exactly they are faring in their industry, what aspects of their marketing they should improve, how good or bad they are doing compared to others and so on.
However, while some data is fairly easy to extract (like social media presence, best performing blogs of your competitors and their engagement level, evaluating overall marketing performance with the help of Website Grader, etc.), some data is incredibly hard to get.
Take email marketing or landing page conversions for example. Businesses don’t usually disclose their CTR (for emails) or CR (for landing pages), which makes it difficult to evaluate your own performance and draw a line between yourself and the competition.
To help you out, we have put together this post, which includes email marketing benchmarks for your company size and industry. HubSpot, the leader of marketing automation, and MailChimp, the leader of email automation, have been the main sources of the research, which means that all the data is accurate and up-to-date. The best thing about this research is that both HubSpot and MailChimp have a wide diaspora of clients, which helps represent the whole spectrum.
Although most statistics don’t differ by much – it’s 0.1-1% difference in most cases – keep in mind that the research included millions of email campaigns. This means that a 0.1% difference might mean the difference between reaching 10.000 more or less people, depending on the outcome, so every percentile matters here.
Email marketing benchmarks – Industries
Before we jump in, there is an important aspect regarding open rates that you should know. Open rate is a very tricky metric (and never 100% accurate), which only works if the person’s email client (or app) is capable of displaying HTML with images.
When the email is sent out, it typically requests a tiny, invisible image from web servers and when the user opens your email, it gets automatically downloaded, which makes it possible to calculate open rate.
If you plan on sending out only text-based emails, you or (your marketing automation) tool will have no real way of recording open rates. Similarly, users reading your HTML emails without images being shown will not be recorded as open either. This makes the usage of images in emails essential and also artificially increases the percentage of opened emails.
If you’d like to understand the basic email metrics be sure to read this 3 step guide to crafting an email marketing strategy.
Ok, it’s high time to jump into some actual numbers.
| Industry | Open Rate | Click Rate |
| Agriculture and Food Services | 24.92% | 3.18% |
| Architecture and Construction | 24.81% | 2.96% |
| Arts and Artists | Â 27.23% | 2.88% |
| Beauty and Personal Care | 18.75% | 2.10% |
| Business and Finance | 21.18% | 2.77% |
| Computers and Electronics | 21.14% | 2.29% |
| Construction | 22.24% | 1.92% |
| Consulting | 19.51% | 2.34% |
| Creative Services/Agency | 22.34% | 2.69% |
| Daily Deals/E-Coupons | 14.44% | 2.01% |
| E-commerce | 16.76% | 2.45% |
| Education and Training | 21.70% | 2.69% |
| Entertainment and Events | 21.37% | 2.36% |
| Gambling | 17.68% | 3.23% |
| Games | 21.19% | 3.45% |
| Government | 26.08% | 3.63% |
| Health and Fitness | 22.25% | 2.74% |
| Home and Garden | 24.24% | 3.68% |
| Insurance | 20.82% | 2.16% |
| Legal | 22.58% | 3.02% |
| Manufacturing | 22.43% | 2.45% |
| Marketing and Advertising | 18.01% | 1.99% |
| Media and Publishing | 22.09% | 4.66% |
| Medical, Dental, and Healthcare | 22.56% | 2.48% |
| Mobile | 19.55% | 2.18% |
| Music and Musicians | 22.85% | 2.91% |
| Non-Profit | 25.06% | 2.83% |
| Pharmaceuticals | 19.78% | 2.57% |
| Photo and Video | 25.89% | 3.74% |
| Professional Services | 20.65% | 2.55% |
| Public Relations | 19.96% | 1.65% |
| Real Estate | 21.21% | 1.94% |
| Recruitment and Staffing | 20.16% | 2.24% |
| Restaurant and Venue | 21.84% | 1.37% |
| Retail | 21.22% | 2.61% |
| Social Networks and Online Communities | 21.77% | 3.42% |
| Software and Web App | 21.20% | 2.35% |
| Sports | 25.66% | 3.35% |
| Telecommunications | 21.50% | 2.53% |
| Travel and Transportation | 20.49% | 2.26% |
| Vitamin Supplements | 17.18% | 1.90% |
Email marketing benchmarks – company size
Unlike landing page benchmarks (where the size of your company has no real effect on the conversion rate), company size does matter when it comes to email marketing. The main reason behind this is that bigger companies have much more resources, workforce and information to share with their audience, and likewise, a big audience expects more content from a bigger company in almost any industry. Here are the benchmarks of email campaigns based on company sizes.
| Company Size | Open Rate | Click Rate |
| 1 to 10 employees | 35.3% | 6.9% |
| 11 to 25 employees | 32.4% | 6.7% |
| 26 to 200 employees | 32.3% | 6.3% |
| 201+ employees | 32.2% | 7.0% |
How many emails should your company send each month?
This is another delicate question that businesses often struggle with. How many emails are good enough to ensure satisfactory results? These days, almost every business is sending out emails to prospects, so how do you actually deliver your message without being annoying?
According to HubSpot, companies that send less than 15 and more than 30 email campaigns see the worst results. In other words, the sweet spot is around 16-30 email campaigns a month, but the exact number you will have to figure out yourself with the help of testing.
Typically, companies that send 16-30 email campaigns/monthly enjoy two times more click rates than companies sending 1-2 emails/monthly.
The benchmarking difference between B2B and B2C companies
According to HubSpot, there are some differences between B2B and B2C email open and click rates. While both B2B and B2C tend to have fairly high open and click rates (over 30%), B2B is more consistent, while B2C ranges from 30.5% to 34.9%. The numbers are calculated for sending 16-30 campaigns/monthly.
The click rates for B2B reach 6.0% on average, and for B2C, the highest median is 5.6%. All calculations are based on 16-30 emails/monthly.
What are the best times for sending emails?
People are busy. If you send out your email at a most inconvenient time, users will typically not even notice it, let alone open or click. If your emails don’t get opened on the spot (or in a shortly after) they will simply get buried under hundreds of others and eventually, get lost.
Generally speaking, the best days to send emails are Tuesday and Thursday, based on numerous studies conducted by industry leaders. Some of the best times include 6am, 10am, 11am, 2pm and 8pm. Notice how each of those times represents a time during a day when a person is most likely not busy:
6am – still in bed
10-11am – coffee break for most companies
2pm – lunch time
8pm – workday long over
Timing and dates are really important, but they are also industry specific. Test different variations to find the one that works for you.
Conclusion – your next move
There you have it: now you know how your emails campaigns are performing compared to others in your industry. The next thing you have to do is decide what you are going to do about it!
If you’d like to take your email marketing to the next stage, be sure to download our FREE guide on how to strategize and boost your email marketing.
Noa Eshed
Noa is the co-author of the Amazon no.1 Bestseller "The Smart Marketer's Guide to Google AdWords" and co-host of the podcast "Real Life Superpowers". She's a content lover, certified journalist & lawyer (Hebrew U). She practices martial arts & yoga. She's been consulting and helping businesses create a significant presence online since 2010.
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Noa is the co-author of the Amazon no.1 Bestseller "The Smart Marketer's Guide to Google AdWords" and co-host of the podcast "Real Life Superpowers". She's a content lover, certified journalist & lawyer (Hebrew U). She practices martial arts & yoga. She's been consulting and helping businesses create a significant presence online since 2010.
