9 Important Email Marketing Benchmarks to keep Tabs On
Email marketing has gained a lot of popularity for its ease of use and effectiveness. We suggest every business promote its brand through email marketing. But, for the people who are already running email campaigns, how do you measure the success of your email campaigns?
This article contains the most important benchmarks of email marketing, that help you understand the position of your email marketing campaign. From open rates to deliverability rates, we have listed them all.
These benchmarks will also help you determine how you compare to your competitors or industry standards.
Alright! Without further ado, let us start with –

Open Rate
To begin with, Open Rate is the most monitored metric in terms of email marketing. It can be calculated by dividing the number of times your email has been opened by the total number of emails sent. Well, this is the formula, but you don’t have to worry about it since your email marketing service should do that for you.
The average email open rate across various industries is 21.33%. If the open rate of your email campaign is around this number, your email marketing is doing just fine. But if it is way less than this, there might be several reasons for it.
How to increase email open rates?
– Subject Lines: Write short and enticing subject lines that compel the reader to open your email.
– Scrub your email list: Maybe your emails are landing in the spam folder, maintain a fresh email list with customers who want to hear from you.
– Choose the right frequency: Sending too many emails may annoy your customer, keep it subtle yet effective
Click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) helps you determine the number of people who click on links present in emails.
Higher the Click-through rate, the better it is.
You can calculate the Click-through rate by dividing the number of recipients who click on the link in your email by the total number of emails sent.
The average click-through rate across industries is 2.62%.
CTR is a good way of understanding the quality of your content. If it is engaging and convincing enough to get the readers to click on the link you provide in your emails.
How to improve the Click-through rate?
– Use engaging content.
– Place your Call-To-Action buttons wisely.
– Use an adequate number of Call-To-Action buttons.
Click-To-Open Rate
Click-To-Open Rate typically calculates the unique clicks. Irrespective of how many times a recipient opened the email, CTOR counts it as one.
On the contrary to open rates which count open individually every time your subscriber opens the email.
It can be calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the total number of emails sent.
How to improve the Click-To-Open rate?
– Make your emails scannable at a glance. People don’t like indulging in a long read.
– Personalize your emails. (Keep it relevant to the reader)
– Use graphical and dynamic content.
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rates exist to remind you that you cannot impress everybody. Not to be taken too seriously as it is very common in any email marketing campaign.
The average unsubscribe rate is around 0.17%, according to campaign monitor. Marketers usually aim to keep the unsubscribe rate below 2%.
How do we calculate it? By dividing the number of unsubscribes by the total number of emails sent.
Unsubscribes are not an issue unless there is too much. Well, if your email marketing campaign is fetching a high unsubscribe rate. We suggest you follow these steps to reduce the email unsubscribes.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate tells you the number of emails that didn’t make it to their destination. Happens for reasons like your emails being flagged as spam, or server issues. The average bounce rate for all industries is 0.7%.You can calculate the bounce rate of a marketing campaign by dividing the bounce rate by the total number of emails.
Basically, there are two different types of bounces.
1. Hard Bounce – This happens typically due to server issues, where the recipient’s server does not accept the email.
2. Soft Bounce – Happens when the email reaches the server but is still returned as undelivered.
How to minimize the bounce rate?
If your emails are getting bounced a lot, make sure that your emails are not being flagged as spam. You can determine the spam score of your emails with the help of several online tools.
Complaint Rate
This is another important email marketing benchmark. Although this doesn’t happen frequently, nevertheless it is important enough to be monitored. The complaint rate shows the number of emails that your subscribers have flagged as spam. To calculate the percentage of complaints, divide the number of complaints by the number of emails sent minus the number of bounced emails.
The downside of the complaint rate is, you are likely to be flagged as spam by email services if the complaint rate of your emails is high.
It becomes extremely hard to deliver your content to your target audience after being flagged as spam.
How to reduce the Complaint rate?
– Send emails to users who have opted-in only.
– Actively practice the double opt-in process.
– Make unsubscribing easy.
– Avoid email blasts, send personalized and relevant content.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate usually helps you understand the amount of time your subscriber spent on your email. Well, it is distinguished into three parts – Read, Scan, and Glance.
Wherein, if your subscriber spends 8+ seconds on your email, it means they have read your email.
Similarly, if they spend time between 2-8 seconds, they scanned your email (read your content quickly to find specific information).
However, if your subscriber spends less than 2 seconds, it means they took a glance at your email. The engagement rate of your emails is directly proportionate to the quality of content present in the email. So, make sure you have some good content written for your emails.
Reply Rate
Reply Rate is determined by the number of email recipients responding to a specific Call-To-Action button. Often overlooked by marketers, this email benchmark is equally important.
The average reply rate across various industries is 5%. And a good number to aim at is 10%.
Deliverability Rate
The deliverability rate tells you the number of emails reaching their destination. Looks straight and simple right? But there’s more to it!
There might be few factors that are obstructing your emails; email bounces, Spam, ISP issues, email blasts sometimes decrease the deliverability rate.
How to improve your email deliverability rate?
– Use authentic email domain.
– Try to avoid spam traps.
– Practice opt-in process
– Scrub your list regularly.
Wrapping up
There you go! Here are the email marketing benchmarks that you need to track. With these metrics, you can determine the performance of your email marketing campaign. based on these metrics you can tweak the marketing campaign strategies to gain optimum results.

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