Yes, I may be a bit biased considering I write B2B lead gen emails (along with the pieces of content they direct to) for a living, but email marketing is nowhere near dead. Instead, companies are sending even more emails than ever before. The Radicati Group forecasted there will be a 5% increase in email sends this year from prior years, with 225.3 billion emails sent every single day in 2017.

With all those emails being sent, there should be a corresponding uptick in email management and tracking, right? Wrong! MarketingProfs indicated in their 2016 “The State of Email Marketing by Industry” report that 15% of marketers do not regularly review email opens nor clicks. If companies aren’t tracking their email marketing performance through a marketing automation system report, how do they know what’s working well, what isn’t, and what they should be testing?

Your email opens and clicks may highlight that video promotions generate the most interest with your readers. Or your readers may respond more to personalized subject lines or ones that highlight the solution to a problem they’re facing, rather than just touting a product feature that you want to promote. Or, and hopefully this isn’t the case, you may discover that your readers are unsubscribing in mass quantities because they think you’re spamming them. But you won’t know that until you dig into your email results.

Now that you know you should be monitoring your email performance (and please don’t tell me if you’re still not going to), let’s look at some benchmarks to compare yourself to. Knowing average open and click-through rates will help show your cost per conversion and justify your email marketing ROI.

First, make sure that you’re comparing apples to apples: In this case, you want to compare your results to B2B average rates rather than B2C rates, because they’re two separate audiences. Both are below just so you have the results, which are from the emfluence “Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark 2016” report:

·         Average open rate:

• B2B: 23.84%
• B2C: 21.84%

·         Average click-through rate:

• B2B: 5.27%
• B2C: 3.58%

Digging down deeper into industry averages, emfluence also has these industries as the top five for click-through rate:

• Advertising/Marketing: 9.78%
• Government: 7.86%
• Agriculture: 7.44%
• Food & Beverage: 6.89%
• Retail: 5.45%

Want to determine your own email click-through rate if you don’t have a marketing automation system and are working from Excel reports? The standard calculation for click-through rate is as follows:

(Total clicks ÷ number of delivered emails) x 100

As an example, if you have 500 total clicks and 5,000 delivered emails, you’d divide the two and take that 0.1 result and multiply it by 100 to get a 10% click-through rate, which is pretty darn impressive. So keep up whatever you’re doing!

On the flip side, if you have 500 total clicks and 20,000 delivered emails, you wind up with a 2.5% click-through rate, so it’s time to get testing and see how you can improve and get more people to click.

Does your company need assistance with email marketing? Contact our team at PartnerDemand for help with email marketing campaigns that will perform!