9 Important Email Marketing Benchmarks to keep Tabs On

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.