The Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks

FOR 2021

Introduction

Details

Almost everything in 2020 was affected by COVID-19 and email marketing was no exception. This year’s industry benchmarks show marked changes from previous years and these changes led to better engagement for almost every industry.

In this guide, Campaign Monitor breaks down our key findings from the 2020 data—such as which industries saw the greatest spike in their averages, which saw the lowest unsubscribes, and more—and provides actionable steps for you to maintain these high levels of engagement for 2021 or start catching up with your peers.

After all, in a survey of Campaign Monitor customers, 91% reported that email would be vital or very important for their marketing efforts in 2021. If you expect email to be a key channel for your business this upcoming year, these benchmarks show you how to make the most of it.

We looked at more than 100 billion emails sent globally by customers of CM Group’s family of brands. The industries you see are the industries self-selected by our customers. If you do not see your specific industry, consider choosing a more general industry for comparison.

Key takeaways and insights for 2021:

1. Total send volume increased by almost 7% this year.

For comparison, total send volume increased by 2.5% from 2018 to 2019, consistent with the usual industry growth YoY. In 2020, that growth almost tripled. That’s billions of emails more than our customers sent last year.

In fact, our customers have sent around one billion more emails every month in 2020 than in 2019. March and July saw the greatest YoY increase with an extra 1.5 billion emails sent each month compared to the same month in the previous year.

It’s not hard to discover why that could be. By March, COVID-19 had hit pretty much every region of the world and the extent of the outbreak began to make itself known. Schools, governments, and businesses had to change plans and disseminate news daily, if not even more frequently. And most of those organizations relied on email to send those notifications and keep their communities up to date. Similarly, July also marked a resurgence of the virus in many places around the world.

Our strict following of email marketing best practices set us up for success. Engagement segments were added to our Campaign Monitor account in 2019 and have played a vital role in ensuring we’re re-engaging or weeding out the deadwood. Maintaining healthy databases in addition to increased demand made for a profitable year for our clients.

- Eric Taylor, Senior Email Account Manager

2. Open rates increased by more than 13% this year.

You might have experienced email fatigue from your own inbox—that feeling of overwhelm when your inbox is packed to the brim and you simply lack the energy to skim through every one. Times of ongoing increased send volume (during the holidays, for example) often result in decreased open rates for brands.

But not this year.

The average open rate jumped by 13% for CM Group customers this year. That’s 13% more people staying informed and engaging with your brand, and 13% more people supporting your mission.

There were a few other interesting differences to note in this year’s open rates as well. For the first time in years, the proportion of emails opened on mobile devices dropped from 63% to 54% in 2020. This downward trend reflects a major industry shift, but it isn’t a surprise when we take the events of the year into consideration: Less time spent commuting, standing in line to buy coffee, and being out and about meant more time spent at a desk, resulting in more people opening emails from their desktop.

Speaking of world events, open rates increased more than 20% YoY in April and May specifically. This was a time when shutdowns and restrictions ramped up around the globe in response to the continued spread of COVID-19.

It’s not uncommon for some of our Partners to see 85+% open rates, which is phenomenal. We believe the combination of people staying home and quality content has led to these crazy open rates. We’ve actively encouraged our Partners to utilise video content more, especially during the three month period where they were not seeing their customers in person.

- Matt Millard, Head of Communications

3. Click-to-open rates (CTORs) actually decreased this year, though not by much.

4. Multiple industries saw click-through rates (CTRs) soar to 4%.

This year, subscribers didn’t click through as often as they have in years past. Click-through rates only increased marginally and click-to-open rates actually decreased.

This isn’t necessarily a cause for concern. We saw a significant increase in email send volume and a large portion of these emails were related to COVID-19, communicating new procedures, warnings, or words of encouragement.

Hence, inboxes saw lots of emails with the sole purpose to inform readers, and there wasn’t supposed to be an action the reader felt compelled to take.

Another reason for this could be email fatigue, as mentioned before, especially if brands weren’t following best practices. In March and April, Twitter was rife with jokes about companies people hadn’t done business with in years suddenly popping up in their inbox to explain their new procedures.

It’s understandable that brands want to make sure everyone knows how they’re keeping employees and their supporters safe; however, segmentation, regulations, and best practices all still apply. Emailing contacts who haven’t heard from you in years is rarely a good idea.

This year, we had four—and Government emails cracked a 6% open rate.

It’s no wonder that 20% of Campaign Monitor customers told us gaining new subscribers would be their main focus next year. More subscribers means more people seeing your best deals, your biggest news, and your most important info.

While some industries have experienced stagnation in this area, many others have continued to experience big improvements to their CTRs. That’s why you should look not only at averages for all industries, but drill down into your specific industry. It’s also a great idea to study how your own metrics have evolved over the past year.

Even as the average CTR stayed relatively consistent, some individual industries saw big improvements. Last year, only the top performing industry cracked a 4% open rate (Government).

5. Government emails experienced a 50% increase in CTR and remained our top performing industry.

As a whole, the Government industry actually experienced a decrease in open rates this year. However, their click-through rates went up by 50%.

Even with a minor drop in open rates, Government emails still experienced the highest percentage of open rates out of all the industries we studied.

As we’ve noted in years past, an important factor in improving email benchmarks is momentum. When your emails have high engagement, brands have more room to test their emails to see what works best for their audience. Times of high engagement—like we’re experiencing right now—present an opportunity for testing. Even if your metrics are below average, you can still A/B test to make every email go further.

The pandemic has created a significant shift in the Vacation Rental industry. Families with big vacation plans abroad were forced to cancel those trips and stick closer to home. Vacation Rentals became a hot commodity since they were clean and avoided commingling with other travelers like Hotels. Our clients’ emails saw unprecedented levels of engagement and ROI.

- Eric Taylor, Senior Email Account Manager

6. In another notable shift, Friday reported the highest open and click-through rates.

Friday not only experienced the highest open and click-through rates, but Friday also tied for the highest click-to-open rates as well. This is a significant deviation from years past and conventional email wisdom.

Usually, Tuesdays and Thursdays are shown to be the best days for high engagement, but not in 2020. Thursday actually had the second to worst open rates, only scoring higher open rates than Saturday. Tuesday was the only day to experience a decrease in open rates compared to last year.

While we can’t say exactly why this is, we can say that the way people have historically engaged with email has been significantly disrupted. Logically, this makes sense: As the structure of daily life adapts to current realities, it stands to reason that email would also experience a shift. We see this most notably in Friday’s high engagement as well as the decrease in mobile use we noted earlier.

The most important thing to remember when planning your email sends is to study your own audience. You can test whether or not a Friday send results in better engagement, or whether it doesn’t. Only you can say what works best for your audience.

I think one reason for the decrease in open rates for some industries is that there’s a lot of digital—including email—fatigue. People are looking for ways to communicate that feel more face to face, whether that’s IRL or through video. To avoid this, our one rule was “If you don’t have anything new or useful to say in the email, then don’t send the email.” For some clients this meant sending less emails while working on preference centres to better customise future email experiences.

- Lauran Vohmann, Senior Digital Marketing Manager

7. Media, Entertainment, & Publishing and Retail saw 0% unsubscribe rates.

Retail is a tough industry that experiences a lot of competition, which can lead to lower metrics for the industry as a whole. Media, Entertainment, & Publishing is also packed with competition. Despite the disadvantages, these industries averaged a 0% unsubscribe rate for 2020.

While no list will truly experience a 0% unsubscribe rate, this average proves that Retail and Media, Entertainment, & Publishing are doing something right when it comes to keeping their audiences engaged and interested in what they have to say.

The best way to keep people engaged is to deliver value and highly-relevant content time and time again. And in fact, these industries are known for in-depth personalization and segmenting lists so they only communicate the most relevant information to their subscribers. They offer goods and services that make it simple for subscribers to choose what interests them most: For instance, newsletters from publishers naturally target audiences with specific interests and many retailers are able to define the category of goods they sell.

While your industry might not have segments as clearcut and ready-made as these two, a 0% unsubscribe rate is worth a little effort to find the segments and personalization that hooks your audience.

If you’re struggling to find money, why torture yourself by looking at what you can’t have? That’s why we spend a lot of time featuring interesting content that isn’t solely about product.

- Matt Millard, Head of Communications

The numbers:

Average email benchmarks for all industries:

18.0% 2.6% 14.1% 0.1%

We always strive to meet and beat the benchmarks! We take a look at our metrics monthly to compare against our sent emails to see what we can improve and plan how we’re going to do that.

- Lauran Vohmann, Senior Digital Marketing Manager

Email benchmarks by industry

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Email benchmarks by day

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What now? Next steps for beating the benchmarks:

1. Start with your benchmarks.

If you try to completely overhaul your entire email strategy, you’re going to end up overwhelmed and disheartened. Instead, choose one metric that you want to focus on improving over the next six months.

To do this, look at your own email metrics for the past year and choose which one can have the biggest impact on your goals. This will most likely be the metric that is the furthest below average, but maybe not. For instance, if you have good open and click-to-open rates, you might find that improving your CTOR and bringing more people to your site will be more beneficial to your marketing goals.

Even if your metrics are drastically better than your industry’s averages, there’s still room to improve. As mentioned earlier, top performing industries often experience the biggest growth YoY.

We get it. Looking at all this data can be intimidating. Having the information is helpful, but only if you know what to do with it.

So here are the next steps you should take right now in order to see real, tangible results for your business or organization.

We’re constantly tweaking and testing things here and there to see where we can improve. At Bluetent, we believe we’re the best digital agency in the vacation rental space. We’ve found that our competitors generally follow our example.

- Eric Taylor, Senior Email Account Manager

2. Look at how your chosen metric has changed over the past 6, 12, and 18 months.

The next step is to identify trends regarding that metric. If you’re slowly but surely trending upward, great! What have you changed in your approach to email that’s driving improved results? Sometimes just continuing to create new and exciting messages is enough to steadily elevate your results.

If you’re somewhere in between or just not sure where to start, look at the emails with the best performance and compare those to the ones doing the worst. You’ll most likely find commonalities in formatting, content, or even segmentation that is and is not resonating with your subscribers.

#1 Something has changed: If one metric is suddenly doing much worse, you were doing something that worked before and now you’re not. Think about your strategy as a whole and if that doesn’t identify the problem, get granular. Have you changed your send cadence? Your content? Even something as seemingly tiny as the color of your CTAs have major consequences.

#2 Something hasn’t changed: If you continue to send the same types of email content over and over again, subscribers will get bored and stop engaging. If you’re experiencing a slow and steady decline, consider how you can surprise and delight your audience with engaging content. Could you include interactive elements? A new format? When you’re stuck, it’s time to start thinking outside of the box.

Is that metric getting worse over time? There could be two reasons for this:

3. Test, test, and more tests.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Look at your notes from steps 2 and bring in more of the elements that lead to better results. If people click on purple CTAs but not yellow ones, use more purple. If your subscribers engage more with emails sent on Friday, send more emails on Fridays.

You don’t have to overhaul everything at once and we recommend you not try. Instead, implement A/B testing to see exactly how that one element affects email engagement. For something like send cadence that you can’t test, you can send a survey or poll to your subscribers to ask them the cadence they prefer.

As the song says, this is where you start back at one. One of the main reasons email is such a powerful tool for marketers is that you have the ability to continuously improve and optimize. The results are buildable and scalable: As you continue to find what works, you’ll see better results across the board.

Testing doesn’t have to be complicated. Remember not to change multiple elements in one email in order to know exactly how that one change affects your results. You’ll also want to be patient and realize it will take time to discover exactly what works for your audience.

Read how The Gist has grown their list size by 233%

Our communications had a dip in open rates a couple of years ago, going from an average of 50% down to 47%. As a marketing team, we didn’t want to see that slide continue. We took a good look at our content and realised some of it wasn’t right for our audience and made appropriate changes. This year, those communications had an average open rate of 53.35%, so it was well worth it.

- Matt Millard, Head of Communications

Wrap up

The last thing your marketing strategy needs this year are more unknowns. Even amidst lockdowns and limitations, email remains a constant source of connection for brands and organizations. Consumers know that email lists are the place to hear updates and news from their favorite organizations, just as organizations know email lists are the place to find their most connected fans.

Marketers know email delivers results, but not everyone knows how to tap into this channel to see the growth and revenue email is capable of bringing in for your brand. These benchmarks are a great place to start when you need to measure the success of your marketing strategy.

These benchmarks illuminate where your email program shines and where it needs polishing. Plus, you can discover where a little bit of time and focus will have the biggest results for your business.

Want to learn more about Campaign Monitor? Request a demo.

Notes about methodology and terminology

In years past, we have looked at only Campaign Monitor customers to determine our industry benchmarks. This year, we looked at customers from all of the CM Group family of brands, about ten times more emails than in years past.

These include but are not limited to Campaign Monitor customers.

These emails are sent globally. Look out for our regional benchmarks reports coming later this year. We’ll focus on the US, UK, Australia, and introducing the first-ever EU benchmarks report.

The “Averages” in this report are averages of all campaigns. Because some industries send more emails than others, taking an average of the 18 industry benchmarks will not give you the same average we refer to throughout the report.

If you’re not sure what individual metrics entail or how they’re being measured, you can learn about email metrics at length—including ideas for how to improve them!—in this guide.

To read up on what each metric means and how it’s calculated, visit this post.