These are the metrics we measure our email marketing efforts against.
Use this helpful guide to see if your email marketing efforts are on track. If one of your metrics is way off, it’s a good indicator that something in your email marketing is not working as well as it could.
Below is a list of benchmarks we use when auditing our email marketing campaigns.
Open Rate
The open rate is becoming less and less reliable because many email providers are corrupting this data. We generally don’t look at this metric anymore deceit in a comparison from email to email.
- Great: 30%
- Good: 20%
- Needs Help: 5%
Click-Through-Rate
The CTR is the second most important to metric to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing. While there are some email providers who are spoofing a link click and corrupting this data, we use Groundhogg for our email marketing, which has a method to verify the link click is a human.
- Great: 10%
- Good: 5%
- Needs Help: Less than 1%
Conversions
Every marketing email you send has an intended response. The best way to measure the actual success of your email is its conversion rate and value. For this benchmark I only included the rate because the value can vary greatly from business and campaign.
Keep in mind, not all “marketing” emails are going to have a hard call to action. Many marketing emails are to nurture the prospect along the way to an eventual sale.
- Great: 5%
- Good: 2%
- Needs Help: Less than .5%
Unsubscribe Rate
One way to keep unsubscribe rates low is with regular email campaigns. If you send an email once per quarter, your unsubscribe rate will be higher than if you email weekly. You may have more unsubscribes, but the rate per email, will be lower which is the key metric.
- Great: 0%
- Good: Less than .1%
- Needs Help: Over 1%
Hard Bounce
It’s important to automatically stop sending emails to email addresses that have a hard bounce. A hard bounce can occur when the address no longer exists (or there’s a typo) or the receiving email server has blocked delivery.
- Great: 0%
- Good: Less than .1%
- Needs Help: Over 1%
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce indicates a problem on the receiving email server. Usually this is temporary and most email sending services will attempt redelivery. Usually soft bounces are caused by recipient email inboxes being full, inactive, the email is too large, or the email server is down.
- Great: 0%
- Good: Less than .1%
- Needs Help: Over 1%
