Benchmarking metrics for email marketing

By Mark Brownlow, July, 2006 (updated December, 2007) | Post to del.icio.us

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MarketingSherpa's 260-chart 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide includes heaps of data to help you optimize your efforts. Read a review.

Numbers have a magic of their own. Print them and they assume an importance often unjustified by their origins. Random guesses become formal estimates. Estimates become assumptions. Assumptions become fact.

But at some point in your work with email, you'll want to compare your results with those of others. Which is why, despite their flaws, you'll need some benchmarking numbers: industry-wide metrics on various aspects of email marketing performance. This article shows you where to get them.

Metrics are useful for the following purposes:

They give you a basic number to work with

Your email marketing may not be directly comparable to any "average," because each list and each email has its own unique characteristics.

But industry metrics at least let you see if you're way off with your numbers. If the average open rate in your sector is 40% and you're getting 10%, you know you have a problem. If you're getting 70%, you know you're doing quite well.

Benchmark metrics also help with planning. If you have no other way of coming up with future estimates, then at least you can fall back on industry averages.

Information on trends

Whatever the rights and wrongs of how published metrics are collected and calculated, they do identify trends (assuming the methods used for collection and calculation remain constant through time).

If open rates across the industry are rising slightly quarter-on-quarter, but yours are falling, then you need to take action.

Hidden and not-so-hidden hints

Insights on what works and what doesn't are often buried in metrics reports, too. There's always a degree of interpretation needed, but you'll get plenty of circumstantial evidence on such issues as the value or importance of list size, segmentation practices, personalization etc.

All of which can help fine tune your approach.

Having said all that, care is needed. Many of those publishing metrics do not define what each one means, how it's calculated, what the source is etc.

To cut a long story short, the public metrics you see are not calculated from hundreds of marketers putting out the same kind of emails to the same kind of readers as you.

Which means it's not fair to compare your results with those metrics, except in the broad ways outlined above.

Take my newsletter for example. Its clickthrough rates are way, way above published averages. But then they should be: the whole point of the newsletter is to point people at useful online resources in an unbiased way.

In fact, I find the "above-average" clickthrough rates disappointingly low: I need to do better.

So after all these ifs, buts, whys and wherefores, where can you actually get hold of some metrics?

The main independent metrics report is MarketingSherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008. It costs just under $350.

As well as covering the basic metrics for different types of lists and marketers, it has a host of other features...including heatmaps, impacts of different tactics on metrics, budget info, design issues, deliverability stats, and more.

Jupiter Research also issue email marketing statistics, but at about $750 a go.

In the UK, the local DMA publishes a National Email Benchmarking Report, which is expensive if you're not a member, but there are free executive summaries produced each quarter.

Now the $350 for the MarketingSherpa report is money well spent. But if that sounds like too much cash, there are some free sources of email marketing data. They also have useful info, just less of it.

Most of these come from email service providers reporting aggregated statistics from across all their clients' email marketing efforts. You'll find insights on open rates, clickthroughs, best-day-to-send, effect of personalization and more. Here are some of the main ones...

US/Global

Australia

Canada

Getting away from averages, you can also find numbers in many published email marketing case studies. Of course, you can't make like-to-like comparisons here either, but every number helps give you a better understanding of email marketing life.

I have a directory of reviewed links to email marketing case studies here.

Finally, keep your eye on the email marketing news. Especially when there's a big online marketing event, companies like to publish the results of surveys and bag a bit of free PR from sites like mine. Whenever you see a metric mentioned, take a note and save for later.

That should keep you going for a bit. And if you find other useful metrics sources, drop me an email and I'll add them to this article.

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