The Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks 2021
(Campaign Monitor)
We get it. Looking at all this data in the above graphic 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 organisation.
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. Top-performing industries often experience the biggest growth YoY.
2. 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?
#1 Something has changed:
If one metric is suddenly doing much worse, you were doing something that worked before and now you’re not. Think about your strategy as a whole and if that doesn’t identify the problem, get granular. Have you changed your send cadence? Your content? Even something as seemingly tiny as the colour of your CTAs have major consequences.
#2 Something hasn’t changed:
If you continue to send the same types of email content over and over again, subscribers will get bored and stop engaging. If you’re experiencing a slow and steady decline, consider how you can surprise and delight your audience with engaging content. Could you include interactive elements? A new format? When you’re stuck, it’s time to start thinking outside of the box.
3. Test, test, and more tests.
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 or change affects your email engagement.
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 optimise. The results are buildable and scalable: As you continue to find what works, you’ll see better results across the board.
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 organisations. Consumers know that email lists are the place to hear updates and news from their favourite organisations, just as organisations 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.
Contact us at Feedsy today to discuss your own email benchmarks but importantly to discover the blueprint for Advanced Client Engagement.
