Summary
Email marketers often seek industry benchmarks for metrics like open and click rates, hoping to gauge their campaign performance against a general standard. While these averages can offer a starting point, relying solely on them can be misleading and may not reflect the unique characteristics of a specific audience or campaign. The ideal target for email marketers should extend beyond mere industry averages, focusing instead on continuous improvement and alignment with specific business objectives.
Key findings
- Industry averages are flawed: Benchmarks vary widely across different reports and industries, making it difficult to find a consistent or truly representative figure. Campaign Monitor highlights that good rates depend on industry.
- ISP perspective: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) typically aim for 100% engaged mail. Any unengaged mail represents a cost to them without revenue potential and can negatively impact their systems. As such, they will never provide a 'good' acceptable rate below 100%.
- Audience alienation: Low engagement rates, even if they meet an arbitrary benchmark, mean a large portion of your audience receives irrelevant mail. This can lead to decreased brand perception and reduced future engagement.
- Internal performance is key: The most valuable benchmark is your own historical performance. Monitoring trends and aiming for continuous improvement against your own prior campaigns offers a more realistic and actionable target.
- Deliverability impact: Poor engagement metrics can signal to ISPs that your emails are unwanted, potentially leading to lower inbox placement. This emphasizes the need to understand how email engagement affects deliverability.
Key considerations
- Focus on real value: Instead of chasing percentages, prioritize sending relevant, valuable content to your subscribers. This naturally improves engagement and deliverability.
- Segment your audience: Different segments may have different engagement patterns. Tailor your campaigns and analyze metrics per segment for more accurate insights.
- Monitor trending metrics: Establish your own baselines by looking at trailing 3, 6, and 12-month data. Aim for consistent improvement over your own historical performance.
- Optimize for conversion: Ultimately, email marketing supports business goals. Focus on metrics that directly contribute to sales or desired actions, not just vanity metrics. Learn more about good engagement thresholds for monitoring.
- Understand the true cost of unengaged subscribers: Sending to unengaged contacts incurs costs and damages your sender reputation, even if it appears to boost open rates slightly.
What email marketers say
Many email marketers grapple with the idea of industry benchmarks, often feeling pressured to meet or exceed these generalized metrics. While a desire for performance comparison is natural, experienced marketers frequently highlight the limitations of such broad averages, advocating for a more nuanced and introspective approach to performance evaluation.
Key opinions
- Benchmark reliance is problematic: Industry averages for metrics like opens and clicks should not be the primary target for email campaigns, as they often create unrealistic or unhelpful expectations.
- Engagement rates can hide issues: Even seemingly good click-to-open rates (e.g., 3%) or low conversion rates (<1%) for a mail flow with a clear call to action should raise red flags, indicating potential problems despite appearing to meet low benchmarks.
- Unique audiences, unique metrics: Clients often assert their customers are unique, yet they paradoxically seek to compare their performance against generic industry benchmarks. Marketers find it more effective to chart client metrics against multiple benchmark studies to show their inconsistencies.
- Campaign-specific analysis: Breaking down metrics by individual campaigns provides a more accurate view, as each campaign performs differently based on intent and audience. Top-line metrics can easily obscure underlying issues.
- Poor CTA correlation: Marketers observe that clients requesting industry-wide benchmarks are often those sending broad marketing blasts with no clear calls to action, which naturally leads to lower performance regardless of benchmarks.
- Business goals over vanity metrics: While delivery metrics are important, marketers must balance them with sales goals and margins. A very high engagement rate on a tiny, insignificant subscriber list won't sustain a business, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive view of key performance indicators.
Key considerations
- Self-comparison is superior: The most effective target is a continuous improvement over your own historical performance (e.g., trailing 3, 6, and 12-month metrics). This allows for internal competition and better adaptation to external changes.
- Identify your baseline: Before comparing, establish what a good email deliverability rate means for your specific sending patterns.
- Address underlying issues: If engagement metrics are low, dig deeper. It's often a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with the targeting, content, or offer, rather than just being 'industry standard'.
- Balance deliverability with revenue: While ISPs want 100% engagement, marketers must balance this ideal with the need to generate sales. This requires strategic segmentation and varied approaches for different user groups.
- Continual optimization: Regularly review campaign performance, experiment with different strategies, and adapt based on your unique audience's response, not just external averages. This includes constantly trying to increase your click-through rate.
Marketer view
An email marketer from Email Geeks suggests that industry averages for open and click rates are a mythical target that should never be the primary goal for email campaigns. Relying on these generalized benchmarks can lead to complacency or misinterpretation of actual campaign health.
Marketer view
A marketing specialist from Campaign Monitor explains that what constitutes a 'good' email metric, such as an open rate, varies significantly depending on the industry. It's crucial to understand that a blanket percentage may not be applicable or beneficial across all sectors.
What the experts say
Deliverability experts often challenge the conventional wisdom around email marketing benchmarks, particularly the idea that industry averages represent an ideal target. They highlight the technical and strategic reasons why ISPs and recipients view email performance differently from marketers, emphasizing the long-term impact of engagement and relevancy on inbox placement.
Key opinions
- No official ISP targets: ISPs will never publish specific benchmark numbers they consider 'good' because their optimal scenario is 100% engagement. Any email below that threshold is considered less than ideal.
- Cost of unengaged mail: From an ISP's perspective, processing, transferring, and storing mail that doesn't generate engagement (e.g., 75% of mail if only 25% opens) incurs costs without revenue, ultimately hurting their bottom line. This underscores why email deliverability rates can be misleading.
- Revenue vs. reputation: Sending unwanted mail, even if it contributes to some desired clicks, compromises an ISP's revenue and damages sender reputation in the long run. They have no incentive to disclose their internal compromises between cost and revenue.
- Recipient perception matters: Even if a campaign meets a benchmark, a high percentage of unengaged recipients (e.g., 90% in a 10% click-to-open scenario) can lead them to perceive the brand as sending shitty email or spam, lowering future marketing success.
- Optimize for 100% relevance: The underlying principle should always be to strive for 100% relevance and engagement. This means focusing on sending less, but earning more by ensuring every email provides significant value to the recipient.
Key considerations
- Beyond averages: While industry averages provide context, deliverability professionals advise against making them the sole target. Focus on metrics that align with the specific goals of each campaign and the overall health of your sender reputation.
- Recipient-centric approach: Prioritize the recipient's experience. If a significant portion of your audience doesn't find your emails valuable, it reflects poorly on your brand and can impact long-term deliverability and domain reputation.
- Strategic segmentation: Implement advanced segmentation strategies to deliver highly relevant content to different user groups. This flexibility can help improve engagement across diverse segments and optimize overall performance.
- Long-term deliverability: Understand that consistently sending unwanted mail, even if it doesn't immediately result in a blocklist, can degrade your sender reputation over time and lead to deliverability issues.
Expert view
An email expert from Spamresource.com notes that while marketers often fixate on open rates, true engagement goes beyond a simple open. The quality of opens and subsequent actions are far more indicative of an email program's health and effectiveness for deliverability.
Expert view
An email expert from Wordtothewise.com suggests that mailbox providers (MBPs) make internal compromises between the cost of processing mail and potential revenue. They will not publicly state an acceptable level of unwanted mail because their goal is to maximize efficiency and user satisfaction.
What the documentation says
Email marketing documentation from leading platforms and research bodies consistently provides benchmarks as a reference point, while also acknowledging their variability and urging marketers to interpret them with caution. The emphasis is often on understanding the unique context of one's own campaigns and applying these metrics for internal optimization rather than as definitive success targets.
Key findings
- Industry-specific data: Documentation provides benchmarks broken down by industry, recognizing that performance varies significantly across different sectors.
- Campaign performance insight: Benchmarks help assess how well campaigns and automations perform compared to similar brands. This can serve as a diagnostic tool rather than a rigid goal.
- Key metrics highlighted: Open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and click-to-open rate (CTOR) are consistently identified as primary indicators for email campaign health across various documentation sources.
- Beyond basic rates: Some documentation also includes unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and conversion rate as crucial metrics, emphasizing a holistic view of email program health and deliverability.
- Importance of segmentation: Many reports underscore that subscriber segmentation and targeted messages significantly boost performance, indicating that personalized engagement often outperforms general blasts.
Key considerations
- Contextual application: Use benchmarks as a guide, not a definitive target. Your unique audience, industry niche, and campaign objectives will always dictate true success. Consider this when evaluating good email marketing metrics for your business.
- Continual improvement cycle: Regularly measure your own metrics and establish internal benchmarks to identify trends and improve performance over time. This aligns with advice to monitor your email deliverability KPIs.
- Beyond opens and clicks: While open and click rates are foundational, metrics like conversion rate, return on investment (ROI), and even unsubscribe rates provide a more complete picture of campaign effectiveness and subscriber sentiment. For example, understanding what is a good bounce rate is crucial.
- Data-driven strategy: Use benchmark data not to hit an arbitrary number, but to gain insights into potential areas for optimization. This can involve A/B testing subject lines, content, or sending times.
Technical article
Documentation from Mailchimp explains that email marketing benchmarks are essential for businesses to understand their campaign performance relative to industry standards. They serve as a foundational tool for evaluation, helping to set expectations.
Technical article
Documentation from Klaviyo notes that their 2025 Email Marketing Benchmarks report is designed to help you gauge how well your campaigns and automations are working in comparison to other brands like yours. This emphasizes the value of relevant peer comparison over generic averages.
Related resources
13 resources
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