A new Email Benchmark Study from Silverpop revealed top performing email marketers are earning a 9.5 percent click-through rate, six times higher than the median click-through rate of 1.5 percent.
Analyzing marketing emails sent by 3,000 brands from 40 different countries during 2013, Silverpop reported on the mean and median benchmarks for various email metrics, including click-through rates, open rates and bounce rates.
From the study:
Top quartile performers had click-through rates that were more than six times higher than the median CTR of 1.5 percent. In contrast, bottom-quartile performers mustered CTRs of no more than 0.2 percent.
Evaluating the CTRs of fourteen different industries, the study found real estate, construction, healthcare, consumer services and nonprofits generated the highest median CTR by industry.
As a top performing industry, healthcare earned a mean CTR of 4.8 percent and median of 2.6 percent. “This might reflect their content, which usually relies more on news and information than on promotions,” claimed Silverpop.
Click-Through Rate by Industry:
According to the study, transactional emails – messages triggered automatically by events such as purchases, subscriptions and account activity – earned a median CTR of 4.2 percent compared to a median CTR of 1.5 percent for non-transactional emails.
At 39.4 percent, the study discovered open rates for the top performing email marketers are more than double the median, and nearly 33 percent higher than the open rates of the bottom quartile performers at 6.5 percent.
Healthcare, nonprofits and education represented industries earning the highest median unique open rates, all generating more than double the lowest median open rate of 11.1 percent by the travel and leisure industry.
Unique Open Rates by Industry:
One fascinating find from the email study was the overwhelming decline in hard-bounces since 2012. At 0.04 percent, Silverpop claimed median hard-bounce rates were down 95 percent from the previous year. “We believe the decrease in hard bounce rates signals that email marketers are taking list hygiene seriously,” said Silverpop.
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