Education, retail, and computer hardware/electronics are the best-performing verticals in email marketing, according to a recent report released by Silverpop that benchmarked open rates, click-through rates, and churn metrics across 14 industries and four geographic regions.
In addition, top marketers across all industries far outpace their peers—with top quartile performers achieving click-through rates nearly four times higher than the median (8.8% compared with 2.3%).
Among the other findings:
- Emails sent by top performers in the education vertical had the highest unique open rate (46.1%) and highest click-through rate (12.8%).
- The healthcare vertical had the best click-to-open rate (33%), which measures click-through rates as a percentage of messages opened.
- Bottom quartile performers had a hard bounce rate of 6.9%, while top quartile companies experienced a rate of only 0.1%.
Below, additional email marketing benchmarks and key findings from the 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Study:
Open Rate
Unique open rate was defined in the report as the percentage of received messages that were opened by one recipient.
- Consumer products scored the highest open rate among industry verticals, tallying a median 25.4% unique open rate.
- While median open rates were fairly close across the board, top quartile performers achieved open rates more than four times higher than bottom quartile performers.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) was defined as the percentage of delivered email messages that drew at least one click.
- The education, healthcare, retail and consumer products/services verticals performed the best of the 14 industries studied.
Bounce Rate
Hard bounce rate was defined as the percentage of sent messages that failed because the email address didn’t exist or the account was closed.
- Across industries, top quartile performers were very consistent, with all segments falling in the 0.1% to 0.2% range.
- Top performing companies had hard bounce rates roughly one-seventieth that of bottom performers.
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate was defined as the percentage of delivered email messages that generated unsubscribe requests.
- The best performers had a 0.03% unsubscribe rate across all regions, while the bottom quartile companies had a unsubscribe rate around 0.5%.
Message Size
Message size was defined as the size of an email message measured in kilobytes (KB), including all text, images and coding.
- The majority of companies are keeping messages below 40KB with a median size of 15.9KB.
About the research: The study examined messages sent in 2012 by Silverpop’s client base—2,787 brands from 40 countries across a variety of industries. A broad set of message types was included in the study, from promotional emails and content-based newsletters to notifications and transactional messages.
