Doesn’t time fly! Another year is here and so I’m excited to announce the release of our 4th Annual UK Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

For the 2012 report we’ve compiled open, click-through and unsubscribe information from over 900 million permission-based emails* sent through Sign-Up.to last year to produce a comprehensive email performance report for small-medium sized businesses, the only one of its kind for the UK.

The figures are broken down into 23 different industry sectors to help you gauge your success and gain some insight into how others in your field are performing.

The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is available free now.

The figures show that email marketing is still performing brilliantly for UK businesses and average open rates across all industries are over 18%, with many sectors considerably outperforming this.

We put together this benchmark each year because we think it’s important that UK small-medium business marketers have a relevant set of averages to work from – other reports we’ve found are either focused on blue-chip brands or non-UK audiences.

*Yep, 900 million emails is quite a lot. It works out at just over 28 emails a second, every second of every day, across a whole year.