How Do Your Email Campaign KPI’s Measure Up?

The ultimate goal of any company… especially its marketing department is to improve engagement with potential customers which will increase sales. There are several creative ways to do this. But first, to do this effectively through email campaigns, it’s important to know and understand what is being measured and what should be measured.

There are 4 key email campaign performance indicators that are typically used to measure email performance.

• Average open rate – An average open rate measures how many email recipients open an email as compared to the total number of emails delivered within a campaign. (https://cxl.com/guides/click-through-rate/benchmarks/)
• Average click-through rate – Average click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks on your link to impressions your link makes. Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not. An impression means that content was delivered to someone’s feed. A viewer doesn’t have to engage with the post in order for it to count as an impression. Also, one person could have multiple impressions for a single piece of content. (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/reach-vs-impressions/)Since it is an average, it looks at the CTR of your overall campaign rather than for each individual keyword. (https://cxl.com/guides/click-through-rate/benchmarks/)
• Average click-to-open rate – Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is the percentage of people who open an email campaign and also click on a link within that campaign. CTOR compares the number of unique clicks to the number of unique opens of an email. (www.activecampaign.com/glossary/click-to-open-rate)
• Average unsubscribe rate – An unsubscribe rate is a measure that indicates the percentage of users who have opted-out from the mailing list after an email campaign. The unsubscribe rate impacts email deliverability, so a large number of unsubscribers leads to negative consequences from email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. (https://sendpulse.com/support/glossary/unsubscribe-rate)

Curious to know how you measure up? Let’s take a look at the averages across most major industries.

Industry Averages for Email

	Open Rate	Click-Through Rate	Click-to-Open Rate	Unsubscribe Rate
Advertising & Marketing Agencies	18.50%	2.30%	12.20%	0.20%
Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting	23.20%	4.00%	17.00%	0.10%
Consumer Packaged Goods	18.10%	2.40%	13.00%	0.20%
Education	24.90%	4.30%	17.30%	0.10%
Financial Services	24.80%	2.70%	10.60%	0.20%
Food & Beverages	15.20%	1.70%	11.30%	0.10%
Government & Politics	26.70%	6.00%	22.40%	0.10%
Healthcare Services	23.40%	3.70%	15.60%	0.30%
IT / Tech / Software Services	19.50%	2.80%	14.30%	0.20%
Logistics & Wholesale	22.70%	2.40%	10.60%	0.30%
Media, Entertainment & Publishing	20.80%	3.60%	17.50%	0.00%
Nonprofit	25.50%	4.10%	15.80%	0.20%
Other	17.80%	2.20%	12.30%	0.10%
Professional Services	18.30%	2.80%	15.20%	0.20%
Real Estate, Design & Construction Activities	19.70%	3.50%	17.70%	0.20%
Retail	12.60%	1.10%	8.50%	0.00%
Travel, Hospitality & Leisure	17.70%	2.00%	11.50%	0.20%
Wellness & Fitness	21.60%	2.80%	13.10%	0.40%
Average	18.00%	2.60%	14.10%	0.10%
Source: Campaign Monitor

The struggle is real.

We’re talking about growing your email list and subscriber base. I may be dating myself here but there was a time (not so long ago) that you would just buy your email lists. Select your target industries, set demographic filters and bada boom, bada bang… off you go. Privacy laws now prohibit the distribution of unsolicited and/or purchased contact information and you must have consent and legal opt-in. Therein lies the struggle. We can all agree how hard it is to find opportunities to get people to freely give their consent. No one wants to be harrassed. One of the simplest ways to do this is when value is offered up in exchange for information, users typically feel giving up their information is worth something. Your offer can help increase conversions on this landing page greatly.

So, what do digital contests have to do with opt-in rates you ask? We’re excited to share the answer! Bottom line, people love contests and promotions. We’ve collected data from our proprietary analytics platform MBD Insights and the numbers are outstanding when it comes to contests and what they can do for your business.

Our Average Contest email opt-in rate is 51%.

This is an AMAZINGLY high opt-in rate! The average website opt-in rate is between 1-5%. Squeeze pages can be as high as 25% so contests take the cake when it comes to building your contact lists and creating engaging content and loyal customers – legally.

If you’re looking for a way to dramatically increase your opt-in rates talk to us! You can reach out at [email protected], we’d be happy to chat.