What You Need To Know About Email Marketing Benchmarks

Taking a look at email marketing benchmarks by industry is the only way to answer a very important question:

Do you really know how effective your email marketing strategy is?

Email marketing benchmarks show the industry averages for metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes, etc.

Once you know what's average for your industry, you can use analytical tools to see how your email marketing campaigns compare. 

Are you beating the average performance for your industry benchmarks? If not, we'll show you how at the end of this article.

Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry: Breakdown

Before we break down these email marketing benchmarks by industry, you should know how we got these numbers.

First, we looked at 10 major email service providers who collectively manage and monitor billions of emails every year. 

Each of these services publishes data from their own businesses, and we first combined them all to give you a comprehensive picture of email marketing benchmarks by industry.

When we did this, we found some large discrepancies between the services we looked at. For example, one email provider had open rates that were 30% or more across all industries, while another provider had open rates less than 20% across the board. 

One source parsed their data for open rates based on the day of the week.

We did our best to find an average for each industry, but this created another challenge.

As each site broke down their email marketing benchmarks by industry, they didn't always have the same definition of what constituted a single industry.

For example, one source considered Marketing and Consulting to be a single industry, while another kept them separate. Some industries weren't included in every benchmark breakdown.

To overcome these challenges (and more importantly, share insights from the hiiv), we leveraged beehiiv's database of 25,000+ newsletters spanning 100+ industries, providing tailored insights directly to you.

Email Marketing Benchmarks: FAQs

What Is the Industry Standard Open Rate for Email Marketing?

The industry standard open rate, of course, depends on the industry, and you’ll get different numbers from different sources.

For example, Klaviyo places the open rate for email marketing in all industries combined at 38.7%. However, WebFX calculates it as only 19.21%, which creates a wide spread. 

These figures give us an average of 28.95%. You’re better off looking at statistics from your own industry; but if you’re getting an open rate of 30% or better, you’re probably doing okay.

We don’t mean to brag, but in the beehiiv newsletter family, the average open rate is 38.7%.

What Are Good Email Marketing Rates?

As we mentioned above, it's best to look at email marketing benchmarks by industry. On top of that, you need to look at different metrics depending on your business goals.  

If you're a creator and want readers to enjoy your content, then open rates might be the most important metric to consider. 

In contrast, click-through rates are going to be a lot more valuable for an e-commerce business. 

In Which Industry Is Email Marketing Most Successful?

It's almost impossible to determine which industry can claim the highest level of email marketing success, but there's a lot of value in exploring it more deeply.

If email marketing does not have a successful track record in your industry, that could be a great opportunity for your business. 

You could be the first in your industry to make email marketing successful, and this will give you a new competitive advantage.

But it's hard to determine which industry has the most success from email marketing. The challenge with this question is that there are many ways to define success.

For example, you could measure the number of transactions generated by email marketing, but different industries have different transaction sizes.  

The whole point of looking at email marketing benchmarks by industry is so you can avoid an apples to oranges comparison.

Here are 3 most important email metrics you should be aware of:

Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry: Final Thoughts

Regardless of what industry you are in, if you plan to use email marketing, you should do everything you can to beat the benchmarks for your industry.

One way to do this is to provide the best quality content you can create. This takes time and effort, so you must make your email marketing as easy and seamless as possible.

Find an email platform that checks all the boxes as far as deliverability, customizable email templates, analytics, etc.

You want to free up as many resources as possible for content creation. This means working on a platform that takes care of everything else.

This is why we recommend using beehiiv. Our entire suite of content tools was built for effortless use. Our no-code template editor lets you fully customize every detail about your email from header to footer. 

We have AI tools that help you create content faster and powerful analytics that give you the guidance you need in order to beat the email marketing benchmarks of your industry.

One of the best things you can do for your business is to start a beehiiv newsletter today.