Two Open Rate Benchmarks you should not ignore

Background

I have been involved in email marketing for almost 20 years and one of the most common questions I get from clients and conference attendees is what is the average open rate, or what open rate should I be aiming for. Google the phrase “open rate benchmarks” and you get 21,400,000 results so there is clearly a lot of demand for and plenty written about open rate benchmarks.

Benchmarks however can be problematic and need to be used with caution. The first and biggest problem is that they represent an average, so even if your open rates reach the benchmark, there will be many brands out there who are doing significantly better than you. Then there is the question of whether the benchmark relates to your industry or sector. How valuable can a benchmark largely consisting of B2B of senders if your company is B2C and vice versa.

We decided to see if we could find benchmarks that could be applied to any brand by analysing the data within Touchstone a Subject Line testing tool, that holds the results of over 1 million Subject Lines (SL’s) received by over 1 Trillion recipients. Touchstone contains open, click and delivery rate data on subject lines that have been sent across many sectors and industries and uses this data to predict how other subject lines will perform. So you find the best SL for your campaign without having to set up or send the test email.

 Findings

 When we crunched the data two variables that met the requirement of being true of all industries and business types, but more importantly were directly actionable, really stood out. Segment size and Send frequency!

 Both might seem obvious, after all who everyone knows that more email you send the lower your open rate will be and that highly targeted emails generate a higher open rate. But what we found in the data was truly surprising, the numbers were consistent across all business types. 

Send Frequency

The chart above shows you the impact of send frequency on open rates. The orange line sloping downwards from left to right is the average open rate you can expect based on how many emails you send a month. On average you can expect an open rate of just under 18% if you send 1 email a month, just over 16% if you send one email a week and just over 12% if you send email out daily. The grey bars show the total number of senders that fall into each category, with the majority of senders operating at a send frequency of between 2 and 3 emails a week.

 Why these numbers are different from other benchmarks is simple, the trend is consistent whatever your open rate. If you ignore the actual numbers and focus on the relative difference between the open rates you will see that the open rate for a monthly email is 10% greater than the open rate for a weekly email and 40% greater than a daily email. One email a week will get you a 10% higher open rate than 2 emails a week. We found this benchmark to be true across the board, so if you currently send 1 email a week and your average open rate is 11% and you want to up your frequency to 2 a week, you can expect your open rate to drop to 9.9%

 How to use this Benchmark 

One of the challenges facing email marketer is managing the often-conflicting demands of the business. On the one hand stakeholders want you to make the numbers, particularly at the end of the quarter or year end, but at the same time your bonus or performance is measured often based on open rates. Armed with this benchmark you can not only argue for your open rate targets to be adjusted according to business-driven frequency increases; you also have the ammunition to push back if performance in terms of open rates fall below the benchmark.

 Segment Size 

This chart shows the impact of segment size on open rates.

Once again, line sloping downwards from left to right is the average open rate you can expect based on what percentage of the total list was mailed. On average you can expect an open rate of just under 18% if your segment is highly targeted – the email is sent to less than 1% of the list. At the other end of the scale emails sent more than 50% of the list, that is pretty much everyone gets the same email the average open rate you can expect falls to 11%. So, a highly targeted email will achieve an average open rate that is 60% higher than an email you send to the entire list. More interestingly what this data also shows is there is very little to gain if your segment is greater than 10% of your list.

That is right, any segment that is greater than 10% of your list in size will not perform much better than an email sent to everyone! 

How to use this Benchmark

 Like the send frequency data, the segment size data is consistent whatever your average open rate. If your average open rate for emails sent to your entire list is 10% you should expect an average open rate of close to 17% for your highly targeted emails and vice versa. Your targets should reflect that.

More importantly if you look at the coloured bars, blue for the total number of campaign orange for the send volume and yellow for total opens, something else becomes clear. While the vast majority (85%) of the email campaigns are targeted <10% of the list these campaigns generate only 27% of send volume and 33% of all opens. By contrast 8% of the email campaigns deployed were sent to >25% of the list, however these campaigns were responsible for 48% of all opens.

What this means for resource constrained marketers is this. When it comes to prioritizing your subject line tests a 10% improvement in your batch email open rates will deliver far more opens than a 50% improvement in targeted emails. No matter how tempting it is to use triggered and automated emails to improve your average open rate, do not lose site of that fact.

 Keep testing and optimizing

 Finally, no matter what benchmark you use, the only way to stop your open rate performance from dipping over time is to keep your subject lines FRESH! Once and done testing is does not work. Our subject line tool Touchstone lets you test and optimize hundreds or iterations of your subject line in minutes. So, you can continue to edit and improve every single email you send before goes out.