Emailcenter have been publishing benchmark figures for email marketers for several months. However we have now broken these figures down into several industry segments to help marketers identify how they are performing against similar organisations.
These figures have been collated from over 250 UK organisations. Some industry sectors have been left fairly generic as the sample sizes of certain sectors are not big enough to provide reliable benchmark figures.
Email campaigns that were text only or had no links were excluded from the analysis. This is because open rates cannot be tracked in a text email and click-thru rates are obviously affected when there is nothing to click on.
The average figure shown below is based upon all email campaigns sent rather than creating an average from the individual industry stats shown. Data is based on the calendar month of July 2006.
Industry |
Open Rate |
Click-thru rate |
Opens vs. Clicks |
B2B |
28.98% |
5.17% |
18.92% |
B2C |
27.44% |
4.83% |
20.93% |
Finance |
21.57% |
1.55% |
8.39% |
Media |
30.77% |
16.65% |
64.59% |
Retail |
30.55% |
15.69% |
57.60% |
Travel |
31.69% |
9.03% |
33.95% |
| Average |
30.06% |
10.80% |
41.33% |
> B2B & B2C
These sectors include general B2B trading organisations such as manufacturing or IT organisations right through to B2C brands who use email for creating awareness or encouraging trial. As these are fairly niche organisation on the whole list sizes tend to be small and it is difficult to make comments on any particular trends as each organisation is so different to the next.
> Finance
This sector will always suffer from several issues. Firstly receiving emails from a loan company is never going to be riveting enough for you to open the email.
Secondly many financial products are only required once every few years so a promotional email about a mortgage is probably only going to be relevant for a very small percentage of the list as most people are tied in for a few years and cannot move.
Finally describing a financial product or service creates problems with spam filters as phrases such as "Interest free" or "Over 18 years old" can cause the email to be flagged as spam.
> Media
Not surprisingly this sector has the highest click-thru rate and opens versus clicks ratio as most are providing interesting and relevant information to subscribers that have proactively requested the email.
> Retail
Retail also encompasses E-Commerce and Mail Order organisations. Many of these are very sophisticated in direct marketing techniques and have been using email marketing as a key component in driving online sales for a number of years. This shows in the stats as they are one of the better performing sectors.
Over recent years there has been an increase in sophistication of targeting leading to more relevant messages through segmentation, dynamic content and behavioral targeting which has seen click-thru rates remain relatively high.
> Travel
Surprisingly the travel sector has the best open rate. Travel organisations are experienced in email marketing and therefore perhaps understand deliverability issues and subject lines better. The click-thru statistics do indicate that many are sending generic offers still rather than segmenting their list so a lack of relevancy has hit both the click-thru rate and percentage of people that open them email from clicking thru.
