The Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks - FOR 2021 - Sailthru
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The Ultimate
Email Marketing Benchmarks
FOR 2021
Introduction Almost everything in 2020 was affected by COVID-19 and email marketing was no exception. This year’s industry benchmarks show marked changes from previous years and these changes led to better engagement for almost every industry. In this guide, Campaign Monitor breaks down our key findings from the 2020 data—such as which industries saw the greatest spike in their averages, which saw the lowest unsubscribes, and more—and provides actionable steps for you to maintain these high levels of engagement for 2021 or start catching up with your peers. After all, in a survey of Campaign Monitor customers, 91% reported that email would be vital or very important for their marketing efforts in 2021. If you expect email to be a key channel for your business this upcoming year, these benchmarks show you how to make the most of it. Details We looked at more than 100 billion emails sent globally by customers of CM Group’s family of brands. The industries you see are the industries self- selected by our customers. If you do not see your specific industry, consider choosing a more general industry for comparison.
Key takeaways and
insights for 2021:
1. Total send volume increased by almost 7% this year.
For comparison, total send volume increased by 2.5% from 2018
to 2019, consistent with the usual industry growth YoY. In 2020,
that growth almost tripled. That’s billions of emails more than our
customers sent last year.
In fact, our customers have sent around one billion more emails every
month in 2020 than in 2019. March and July saw the greatest YoY
increase with an extra 1.5 billion emails sent each month compared to
the same month in the previous year.
Our strict following of email marketing best practices set us up
for success. Engagement segments were added to our Campaign
Monitor account in 2019 and have played a vital role in ensuring
we’re re-engaging or weeding out the deadwood. Maintaining
healthy databases in addition to increased demand made for a
profitable year for our clients.
- Eric Taylor, Senior Email Account Manager
It’s not hard to discover why that could be. By March, COVID-19 had hit
pretty much every region of the world and the extent of the outbreak
began to make itself known. Schools, governments, and businesses
had to change plans and disseminate news daily, if not even more
frequently. And most of those organizations relied on email to send
those notifications and keep their communities up to date.
Similarly, July also marked a resurgence of the virus in many places
around the world.
2. Open rates increased by more than 13% this year.
You might have experienced email fatigue from your own inbox—that
feeling of overwhelm when your inbox is packed to the brim and you
simply lack the energy to skim through every one. Times of ongoing
increased send volume (during the holidays, for example) often result
in decreased open rates for brands.
But not this year.
The average open rate jumped by 13% for CM Group customers this
year. That’s 13% more people staying informed and engaging with your
brand, and 13% more people supporting your mission.
It’s not uncommon for some of our Partners to see
85+% open rates, which is phenomenal. We believe the
combination of people staying home and quality content has
led to these crazy open rates. We’ve actively encouraged
our Partners to utilise video content more, especially during
the three month period where they were not seeing their
customers in person.
- Matt Millard, Head of Communications
There were a few other interesting differences to note in this year’s open rates
as well. For the first time in years, the proportion of emails opened on mobile
devices dropped from 63% to 54% in 2020.
This downward trend reflects a major industry shift, but it isn’t a surprise when
we take the events of the year into consideration: Less time spent commuting,
standing in line to buy coffee, and being out and about meant more time spent
at a desk, resulting in more people opening emails from their desktop.
Speaking of world events, open rates increased more than 20% YoY in April and
May specifically. This was a time when shutdowns and restrictions ramped up
around the globe in response to the continued spread of COVID-19.
3. Click-to-open rates (CTORs) actually
decreased this year, though not by much.
This year, subscribers didn’t click through as often as they have in This year, we had four—and Government emails cracked a
years past. Click-through rates only increased marginally and click-to- 6% open rate.
open rates actually decreased.
It’s no wonder that 20% of Campaign Monitor customers told us
This isn’t necessarily a cause for concern. We saw a significant gaining new subscribers would be their main focus next year. More
increase in email send volume and a large portion of these emails were subscribers means more people seeing your best deals, your biggest
related to COVID-19, communicating new procedures, warnings, or news, and your most important info.
words of encouragement.
While some industries have experienced stagnation in this area, many
Hence, inboxes saw lots of emails with the sole purpose to inform others have continued to experience big improvements to their CTRs.
readers, and there wasn’t supposed to be an action the reader felt That’s why you should look not only at averages for all industries, but
compelled to take. drill down into your specific industry. It’s also a great idea to study how
your own metrics have evolved over the past year.
Another reason for this could be email fatigue, as mentioned before,
especially if brands weren’t following best practices. In March and
April, Twitter was rife with jokes about companies people hadn’t done
business with in years suddenly popping up in their inbox to explain
their new procedures.
It’s understandable that brands want to make sure everyone knows
how they’re keeping employees and their supporters safe; however,
segmentation, regulations, and best practices all still apply. Emailing
contacts who haven’t heard from you in years is rarely a good idea.
4. Multiple industries saw click-through
rates (CTRs) soar to 4%.
Even as the average CTR stayed relatively consistent, some individual
industries saw big improvements. Last year, only the top performing
industry cracked a 4% open rate (Government).
5. Government emails experienced a 50% increase in
CTR and remained our top performing industry.
As a whole, the Government industry actually experienced a decrease
in open rates this year. However, their click-through rates went up by
50%.
Even with a minor drop in open rates, Government emails still
experienced the highest percentage of open rates out of all the
industries we studied.
As we’ve noted in years past, an important factor in improving email
benchmarks is momentum. When your emails have high engagement,
brands have more room to test their emails to see what works best for
their audience.
Times of high engagement—like we’re experiencing right now—
present an opportunity for testing. Even if your metrics are below
average, you can still A/B test to make every email go further.
The pandemic has created a significant shift in the Vacation Rental
industry. Families with big vacation plans abroad were forced
to cancel those trips and stick closer to home. Vacation Rentals
became a hot commodity since they were clean and avoided
commingling with other travelers like Hotels. Our clients’ emails saw
unprecedented levels of engagement and ROI.
- Eric Taylor, Senior Email Account Manager
6. In another notable shift, Friday reported the
highest open and click-through rates.
Friday not only experienced the highest open and click-through rates,
but Friday also tied for the highest click-to-open rates as well.
This is a significant deviation from years past and conventional
email wisdom.
Usually, Tuesdays and Thursdays are shown to be the best days for
high engagement, but not in 2020. Thursday actually had the second
to worst open rates, only scoring higher open rates than Saturday.
Tuesday was the only day to experience a decrease in open rates
compared to last year.
While we can’t say exactly why this is, we can say that the way people
have historically engaged with email has been significantly disrupted.
Logically, this makes sense: As the structure of daily life adapts to
current realities, it stands to reason that email would also experience a
shift. We see this most notably in Friday’s high engagement as well as
the decrease in mobile use we noted earlier.
The most important thing to remember when planning your email
sends is to study your own audience. You can test whether or not a
Friday send results in better engagement, or whether it doesn’t. Only
you can say what works best for your audience.
I think one reason for the decrease in open rates for some industries
is that there’s a lot of digital—including email—fatigue. People
are looking for ways to communicate that feel more face to face,
whether that’s IRL or through video. To avoid this, our one rule was
“If you don’t have anything new or useful to say in the email, then
don’t send the email.” For some clients this meant sending less
emails while working on preference centres to better customise
future email experiences.
- Lauran Vohmann, Senior Digital Marketing Manager
7. Media, Entertainment, & Publishing and
Retail saw 0% unsubscribe rates.
Retail is a tough industry that experiences a lot of competition,
which can lead to lower metrics for the industry as a whole. Media,
Entertainment, & Publishing is also packed with competition.
Despite the disadvantages, these industries averaged a 0%
unsubscribe rate for 2020.
If you’re struggling to find money, why torture yourself by
looking at what you can’t have? That’s why we spend a lot
of time featuring interesting content that isn’t solely about
product.
- Matt Millard, Head of Communications
While no list will truly experience a 0% unsubscribe rate, this average
proves that Retail and Media, Entertainment, & Publishing are doing
something right when it comes to keeping their audiences engaged
and interested in what they have to say.
The best way to keep people engaged is to deliver value and highly-
relevant content time and time again. And in fact, these industries are
known for in-depth personalization and segmenting lists so they only
communicate the most relevant information to their subscribers.
They offer goods and services that make it simple for subscribers
to choose what interests them most: For instance, newsletters from
publishers naturally target audiences with specific interests and many
retailers are able to define the category of goods they sell.
While your industry might not have segments as clearcut and ready-
made as these two, a 0% unsubscribe rate is worth a little effort to find
the segments and personalization that hooks your audience.
The numbers:
Average email benchmarks for all industries:
18.0% 2.6% 14.1% 0.1%
We always strive to meet and beat the benchmarks! We take a look at
our metrics monthly to compare against our sent emails to see what
we can improve and plan how we’re going to do that.
- Lauran Vohmann, Senior Digital Marketing Manager
Email benchmarks by industry
Don’t wait. Start building an email right away.Email benchmarks by day
Want to see Campaign Monitor in action? Get started for free.What now?
Next steps for beating the benchmarks:
We get it. Looking at all this data can be intimidating. Having the
information is helpful, but only if you know what to do with it.
So here are the next steps you should take right now in order to see
real, tangible results for your business or organization.
1. Start with your benchmarks.
If you try to completely overhaul your entire email strategy, you’re
going to end up overwhelmed and disheartened. Instead, choose one
metric that you want to focus on improving over the next six months.
To do this, look at your own email metrics for the past year and choose
which one can have the biggest impact on your goals. This will most
likely be the metric that is the furthest below average, but maybe not.
For instance, if you have good open and click-to-open rates, you might
find that improving your CTOR and bringing more people to your site
will be more beneficial to your marketing goals.
Even if your metrics are drastically better than your industry’s
averages, there’s still room to improve. As mentioned earlier, top
performing industries often experience the biggest growth YoY.
We’re constantly tweaking and testing things here and there to
see where we can improve. At Bluetent, we believe we’re the best
digital agency in the vacation rental space. We’ve found that our
competitors generally follow our example.
- Eric Taylor, Senior Email Account Manager2. Look at how your chosen metric has changed over the past 6, 12, and 18 months.
The next step is to identify trends regarding that metric. If you’re slowly but surely trending upward, great! What have you changed
in your approach to email that’s driving improved results? Sometimes just continuing to create new and exciting messages is
enough to steadily elevate your results.
Is that metric getting worse over time?
There could be two reasons for this:
#1 Something has changed: #2 Something hasn’t changed:
If one metric is suddenly doing much worse, you were doing If you continue to send the same types of email content over and
something that worked before and now you’re not. Think about your over again, subscribers will get bored and stop engaging. If you’re
strategy as a whole and if that doesn’t identify the problem, get experiencing a slow and steady decline, consider how you can
granular. Have you changed your send cadence? Your content? Even surprise and delight your audience with engaging content. Could you
something as seemingly tiny as the color of your CTAs have major include interactive elements? A new format? When you’re stuck, it’s
consequences. time to start thinking outside of the box.
If you’re somewhere in between or just not sure where to start, look at the emails with the
best performance and compare those to the ones doing the worst. You’ll most likely find
commonalities in formatting, content, or even segmentation that is and is not resonating with
your subscribers.3. Test, test, and more tests.
Look at your notes from steps 2 and bring in more of the elements that
lead to better results. If people click on purple CTAs but not yellow
ones, use more purple. If your subscribers engage more with emails
sent on Friday, send more emails on Fridays.
You don’t have to overhaul everything at once and we recommend you
not try. Instead, implement A/B testing to see exactly how that one
element affects email engagement. For something like send cadence
that you can’t test, you can send a survey or poll to your subscribers to
ask them the cadence they prefer.
Our communications had a dip in open rates a couple of
years ago, going from an average of 50% down to 47%. As
a marketing team, we didn’t want to see that slide continue.
We took a good look at our content and realised some
of it wasn’t right for our audience and made appropriate
changes. This year, those communications had an average
open rate of 53.35%, so it was well worth it.
- Matt Millard, Head of Communications
Testing doesn’t have to be complicated. Remember not to change
multiple elements in one email in order to know exactly how that one
change affects your results. You’ll also want to be patient and realize it
will take time to discover exactly what works for your audience.
4. Rinse and repeat.
As the song says, this is where you start back at one. One of the main
reasons email is such a powerful tool for marketers is that you have the
ability to continuously improve and optimize. The results are buildable
and scalable: As you continue to find what works, you’ll see better
results across the board.
Read how The Gist has grown their list size by 233%Wrap up The last thing your marketing strategy needs this year are more unknowns. Even amidst lockdowns and limitations, email remains a constant source of connection for brands and organizations. Consumers know that email lists are the place to hear updates and news from their favorite organizations, just as organizations know email lists are the place to find their most connected fans. Marketers know email delivers results, but not everyone knows how to tap into this channel to see the growth and revenue email is capable of bringing in for your brand. These benchmarks are a great place to start when you need to measure the success of your marketing strategy. These benchmarks illuminate where your email program shines and where it needs polishing. Plus, you can discover where a little bit of time and focus will have the biggest results for your business. Want to learn more about Campaign Monitor? Request a demo.
Notes about
methodology and terminology
In years past, we have looked at only Campaign Monitor customers to determine our industry benchmarks.
This year, we looked at customers from all of the CM Group family of brands, about ten times more emails
than in years past.
These include but are not limited to Campaign Monitor customers.
These emails are sent globally. Look out for our regional benchmarks reports coming later this year. We’ll
focus on the US, UK, Australia, and introducing the first-ever EU benchmarks report.
The “Averages” in this report are averages of all campaigns. Because some industries send more emails
than others, taking an average of the 18 industry benchmarks will not give you the same average we refer to
throughout the report.
If you’re not sure what individual metrics entail or how they’re being measured, you can learn about email
metrics at length—including ideas for how to improve them!—in this guide.
To read up on what each metric means and how it’s calculated, visit this post.You can also read
