The Latest Email Marketing Benchmarks By Industry

Today, email is just one of a hundred ways to reach a customer. The world is becoming increasingly sensitive to irrelevant, spammy information, and emails that aren’t segmented or personalized cause great harm to the brand’s reputation. But does segmentation or personalization actually help? Is it worth the investment of time, money, and effort?

This report analyzes over 5.3 billion emails sent across 6 months to answer these questions. Through this report, we check whether advanced email strategies such as segmentation, personalization, or journey-based campaigns improve metrics, and analyze the scale of improvement.

This report covers email marketing benchmarks from four major industries: Shopping (this includes apparel, E-commerce, grocery and food delivery, and retail brands), BFSI (this covers banking, fintech, insurance, and crypto businesses), Media and Entertainment (including gaming, OTT, news, and classifieds sectors), and Lifestyle Services (which cover hotels, logistics, and lifestyle and productivity brands).

The Email Marketing Benchmarks Report is a global report that covers 5 major regions: North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Statistics for each region have further been segregated by industry, covering four major verticals, which are Shopping, Banking, Fintech & Insurance, Media & Entertainment, and Lifestyle Services.

This report covers the most important metrics for email marketing: email delivery rate, unique opens, click-to-open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate.

The report also analyzes brands across geographies and verticals to understand what leads to a higher open rate, which tactics work best, whether segmentation or personalization impacts click rate, or if journey-based campaigns deliver the highest open rates.

Customers have an increasingly no-nonsense attitude towards marketing communication. They react negatively to messages that are intrusive or irrelevant to their needs.

This is why personalization is key to a good marketing strategy. Emails need to go beyond addressing the customer by first-name basis, and deliver value to each individual tailored to their specific needs.

Intelligent segmentation is bare minimum today. Customers need to be grouped into categories automatically based on their behavior, preferences, and purchase trends. Brands need to recognize this and act accordingly.

Emails also need to be tailored to the customer journey. If a customer is about to make a purchase, emails advertising a discount make sense. If a customer is speaking to customer support, emails reassuring them that their resolution is in progress, make more sense. Consequently, if a customer is about to churn, an email telling them that you’re deleting their information from your database and won’t spam them will go a long way.

This report takes data from 5.3 Billion emails.

We’ve benchmarked four types of emails here: broadcast emails, auto-triggered, personalized, and journey-based emails. We’ve added an explainer about every kind of email inside as well.

You can either read through this report sequentially or jump to the industry of your choice from the table of contents.

If you’ve jumped to the industry of your choice, you can check metrics for your region. For this report, we’ve classified global regions into 5 groups: North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.

Have you ever wondered how your target audience interacts with other email campaigns? How does your email campaign performance compare with industry averages? This report compares email metrics such as email click-through rate, click to open rate, open rates, average CTR, engagement rates, and more across industries such as shopping, BFSI, media and entertainment, and lifestyle services.

Here’s where you’d see the impact of email subject lines—subject lines that focus on engaging the customer improve open rates significantly. At the same time, brands can reduce spam complaint rates, average unsubscribe rates, and email deliverability with relevant content and email strategy.

Email marketers around the world leverage multiple methods to improve email marketing statistics, such as linking an email to a blog post, ensuring emails delivered are above industry average, sending personalized emails that deliver value to each customer, keeping the mailing list clean so that spam issues do not crop up due to too many hard bounces, sending emails only to customers who are genuinely interested in your product, etc.

Brands also promote customers to become email subscribers so that they receive more than just transactional emails, they receive targeted content that shows them some content about what they like and what they might be interested in.

Another best practice to reach subscribers inboxes is to show examples of how other businesses might handle digital marketing or email marketing strategy, which numbers they focus on, and how this business keeps their email list clean to reduce bounce rate.

Email open rates are crucial to help you understand the overall health of your marketing emails and digital marketing strategy. By keeping an eye on your average open rate, you can understand whether your emails are landing in the spam folder or reaching invalid email addresses. You can confirm whether the customers in your subscriber list are actually receiving and opening your emails.

When you send promotional emails, average email open rates typically take a hit as email recipients are receiving communication they haven’t opted in for. With transactional emails, on the other hand, customers have usually agreed to a double opt in, so you can be sure that these emails have a higher average email open rate.

Through reports such as the MoEngage email benchmarks report, you can compare statistics such as open rates with businesses in the same industry as yours, along with other email statistics such as average click rate, click through rate, email engagement rates, inbox success metrics such as average email open rate, and best practices for email marketing success.

Email marketing generates 42X ROI, even today when customers are inundated with messages from various businesses competing for their attention. Email is a great way to reach your customers instantly, at a place where they can interact with your brand voluntarily. This increases engagement rate, keeps your customer happy, and also gives your customer a way out with an ‘unsubscribe’ button readily available.

This is why most marketing automation platforms today come with email as a standard feature. It’s too important to the customer lifecycle to ignore.

While each industry might have a different metric that measures the health of your digital marketing strategy, some email marketing stats tell us more than the others. Average unsubscribe rate, or average email bounce rate, for example, is telling of the strength of your email marketing campaign, your subject line, and your call-to-action.

Metrics such as these directly impact your open rate, and once your average open rate is up, your segmented campaigns are more likely to compare well with other benchmarks. According to the MoEngage survey, businesses with the highest open rate have clean email lists because more emails are successfully delivered.

Marketers who take personal care to ensure this can reduce their average email unsubscribe rate and average bounce rate.

One important metric to keep an eye on is email open rate. A high open rate can directly impact other email marketing metrics such as click through rates, click to open rate, conversion rate, etc., while a low open rate can indicate a high bounce rate, meaning that more subscribers experiencing bounced emails than emails delivered.

At the same time, your business must keep an eye on the unsubscribe rate to make sure that your customers are happy with the communication they are receiving, and this, in turn, impacts other metrics such as average click-through rate, click rate, conversion rate, etc.

Each business has different needs, and each customer might require a different kind of communication molded to their requirements. This is why it is hard to define one tool as ‘the best email marketing tool’, but at the same time, the ideal tool must enable marketers to create relevant campaigns, personalized to each customer’s preferences and segmented for their behavior.

The ideal platform is also more than just an email tool—it enables marketers to create omnichannel campaigns that engage with customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey.