The Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks (2019): By Day, Industry

• Updated on: 2019-04-25
• Read original article here

Introduction
We analyzed millions of email campaigns. This is what we found.
Email marketing benchmarks provide you with valuable information about the health of your email sends. They allow you to see how your campaigns compare to industry standards and find opportunities to improve your strategy and, ultimately, get better results.
And over the past several years, we’ve had countless users ask for industry benchmarks based on real campaign data, but we didn’t have it — until now. Today, we are excited to share our findings for 2019 email marketing benchmarks by industry and day, based on millions of Campaign Monitor customer emails.
Chapter 1
Email benchmarks by industry and day, based on real campaign data
We analyzed over 30 billion emails sent across 4.2 million campaigns sent through Campaign Monitor in 2018. Then we compiled the results into a single, comprehensive resource so that any email marketer can easily see industry norms and see how they stack up.
Explore the data below to discover how your emails perform compared to others in your industry based on key metrics like open rate, click rate, unsubscribes and more.
Average email benchmarks for all industries
Average open rate: 17.92%
Average click rate: 14.10%
Average bounce rate: 1.06%
So what did we learn? Here are the top takeaways for email marketers, based on an analysis of over three billion emails.
Best days for email marketing
Best day for highest email open rates: Thursday
Best day for lowest unsubscribe rates: Sunday or Monday
Best day for highest click rates: Saturday
Best day for lowest bounce rates: Monday
Worst days for email marketing
Worst day for lowest email open rates: Sunday
Worst day for highest unsubscribe rates: Wednesday
Worst day for lowest click rates: Monday
Worst day for highest bounce rates: Friday
Top industries by open rate
Nonprofit (20.39%)
Explore more resources on open rates »
Email click rate
The email click rate (also known as an email click-through rate) is the percentage of people who click on a link or image within an email. The email click rate may be considered a measure of the immediate response rate of an email, but not the overall success.
It is often a key metric used to measure the success—or lack of success—of a specific email campaign. We found an average email click rate of 14.10%.
How to improve your email click rate:
Make sure your email renders well across devices
Collect the right data to segment and personalize
Optimize your email design and copy
Include an irresistible, easy-to-click call-to-action
A/B test each email element individually
Automate your emails to scale what works
Explore more resources on click rates »
Spam rate
Email spam is also called junk mail, and it sometimes includes phishing links from sites that host malware and viruses. It is sometimes sent in large, bulk quantities, while other times it appears as unsolicited commercial emails.
The spam rate is how often the recipient marks your emails as spam, based on information that ISPs report to ESPs via a defined path. Campaign Monitor emails have an average spam rate of 0.002%.
How to improve your spam rate:
Use a familiar ‘From’ name so subscribers recognize you
Don’t send from email addresses like ‘noreply@company.com’
Only email people who have given you permission to email them
Send from a business-configured domain
Avoid using spam-like formatting
Explore more resources on spam rates »
Unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribe is the action a user takes to opt out of getting any more emails. The percentage of people who unsubscribe is often displayed as a reporting number on each email campaign you send.
This is an important number to study on every campaign to see if certain topics, subject lines, or templates drive up your unsubscribe number, as this is an indicator of an unhappy or disinterested audience. We found an average unsubscribe rate of 0.17%.
How to improve your unsubscribe rate:
Grow a healthy list from the start
Use automation to build long-term brand engagement
Segment your audience to send more relevant emails
Re-engage your audience to maintain list hygiene
Remember that some list churn is normal and healthy
Explore more resources on unsubscribe rates »
Email bounce rate
A bounced email is an email that couldn’t be delivered. Specifically, it’s an explanation of delivery failure related to server or spam issues, whether these issues are permanent or temporary.
Typically, bounce rate is a metric expressed as a percentage of subscribers who didn’t receive your message. There are two types of bounces: hard and soft . We found an average bounce rate of 1.06%.
How to improve your email bounce rate:
Don’t send to stale lists
Never use purchased lists
Never use free webmail addresses
Avoid spammy content
Explore more resources on bounce rates »
Email deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes. It’s what some marketers use to gauge the likelihood of their email campaigns reaching their subscribers’ inboxes related to actual delivery.
Issues with ISPs, throttling, bounces, spam issues, and bulking hurt your deliverability and thus reduce the number of your emails that will land in your subscribers’ inboxes.
That’s why your deliverability will impact everything from open rate to clicks to spam reports, so prioritizing this will have a huge impact on your email marketing success.
How to improve your email deliverability:
Send using custom authentication
Chapter 13
How to use benchmarks to improve your email marketing
Benchmarks are useful to see how your own email program compares to industry standards. They can help establish a baseline for figuring out how and where you can improve. But we also recommend using your own past results as the benchmark. It’s one of the easiest ways to determine what success looks like for your brand.
Take a look at your average open rates over time. Are they improving even as your list continues to grow, or are they declining as your list becomes fatigued?
How much revenue or site traffic do you typically drive with each email? Those trends often signal exactly what you need to know to optimize your strategy.
You’ll also want to account for all the variables involved. For instance, a broadcast send to your entire audience probably won’t do as well as one to a small segment of engaged subscribers.
Finally, your best bet for optimizing each area of your email strategy is testing, so test, test, and test again! It’s the very best way to get to know your audience and get your best results yet.
We will be updating this page with new data as we have it, so check back for regular updates.