Open Rates, CTR, and Other Benchmark Numbers From Email Marketing Research

Updated on :October 09, 2023
By :Mark Raymond

If you are a marketer, you would be aware of how crucial certain metrics are, when it comes to email marketing. Out of all, Open Rates and Click-Through Rates are vital to most of the optimization strategies.

Open Rate is the percentage of the people who opened the email out of those that were sent. As email subject lines are the deciding factor, it can be inferred that open rate shows if subject lines are working. Also, in a broader assessment, open rate directly affects your email reputation score; so that your next marketing email doesn't get weeded by spam-filters.

CTR is the percentage of the people who clicked on one of the links from the emails out of those that were delivered. Virtually, click-through is a gateway to lead generation. Thus, CTR can be not only a measuring factor for lead generation but also a viability-check for most of the email body, and its components.

But you would wonder, what are the industry benchmarks? Recent email marketing survey by GoodFirms reveals average numbers to follow as industry standards. Learn the detailed findings from Benchmark Numbers, and Trends for Highly Converting Email Marketing Campaigns surveyed and composed by GoodFirms.

The participant marketers were asked, “What are the benchmark average open rates and CTR for marketing emails?” Though these numbers vary based on industries and geographies, the marketers implied that a general benchmark is requisite for the efforts. Here are the stats deduced from the survey:

The average Open Rate, across all geographies and industry sectors, is 22.5%.

email-marketing-research-open-rate-table

The average Click-Through Rate, across all geographies and industry sectors, is 4.2%.

email_marketing_research_ctr_table

GoodFirms surveyed 100+ professionals from email marketing agencies as well as digital marketers to compile research on stats, practices, and trends of email marketing. Many of these participants hail from Top Digital Marketing Companies around the globe. The comprehensive analysis is aimed to benefit industry professionals, and even service-seekers, to power up their marketing performances.

Here are the highlights from the extensive research:

  • Marketers prefer the simplest email marketing goals such as strong customer relations, selling products/services, growing customer base, brand awareness, boosting engagement, building credibility, and weekly updates.
  • Marketing professionals set an average Email Open Rate to be 22.5% and average Click-through rate to be 4.2%, pan geographies, and industry sectors.
  • Marketers take on these 5 strategies to optimize marketing emails - landing pages, personalization, subject lines, social media links, and user-generated content.
  • A majority of marketers (53.75%) send marketing emails once every week.
  • Marketing emails landing up in the spam folder is the biggest challenge faced by the marketers. Other significant challenges are creating compelling content, boosting open rates & CTR, promotion tabs, and growing & retaining subscribers.
  • MailChimp, Hubspot CRM, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, GetResponse, and ONTRAPOT emerged as the populist email marketing tools.
  • Marketers spend an average of 12.09% of the total marketing budget for email marketing.
  • Some of the most popular types of marketing emails turned out to be Announcement Emails, Welcome Emails, Thank You Emails, Lead Nurturing Emails, Remarketing Emails, and Customer Acquisition Emails.
  • Here are the top 4 email marketing trends to be followed in 2019 - Behavioral Targeting, Interactive Emails, Hyper-Personalization, and Mobile-Friendly.
  • 91.25% of the industry professionals envision AI would enhance email marketing in the form of Smart A/B Testing, Hyper-Personalization, Perfect Email Timings, Dynamic Segmentation, and Improving Buying Experience.

Perks for Service-Seekers

A lot is to be done if businesses want to realize those benchmark numbers. Also, there’s plenty of rooms at the bottom as demonstrated by applications of Artificial Technology. Thus, while email marketing is just as important, businesses need professional agencies that they could partner up. If you are looking for any such service provider, check out GoodFirms' list of Top Email Marketing Service Providers; which guarantee to keep you stay afloat on latest practices.

Mark Raymond
Mark Raymond

Mark is a Content Developer at GoodFirms, a proficient B2B research & review firm dedicated to IT Industry. He considers - Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic. With several years of experience in technical writing, Mark has always been fascinated by the wonders of technology; which inspires him to write and spread enthusiasm about the same.

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