The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

The 2012 edition of our Email Benchmark Report is our biggest yet and has been compiled from data on over 900 million permission-based emails sent through the Sign-Up.to interactive marketing platform by small-medium sized UK based organisations.

Read on to find out how your results compare. Feel free to repost this data, but please attribute and link back to this page. Thanks!

Average email campaign performance

Across all industries the average results for UK SME email marketing campaigns were:

Open rate: 18.35%
Click-through rate: 2.95%
Unsubscription rate: 0.15%
Click-to-open rate: 15.42%
Unsubscribe-to-open rate: 0.97%

The benchmark report is available as a downloadable PDF and we've also presented the data as interactive charts below - click on a data series in the chart legends to view/hide those results and adjust the chart scale accordingly.

Open rate, click through rate and unsubscriptions by industry

Graph of email open rate, clicks and unsubscriptions by industry. Data will load momentarily. Unless you have javascript disabled, in which case, you need to turn it on before you can view the graph.

Click-to-open and unsubscribe-to-open rates by industry

These figures look at the proportion of those actually opening an email who clicked or unsubscribed - rather than just those receiving (but not necessarily opening) an email campaign.

Graph of email click-to-open and unsubscribe-to-open rates by industry. Data will load momentarily. Unless you have javascript disabled, in which case, you need to turn it on before you can view the graph.

Averages are a good place to start when benchmarking your own performance, but there are many factors which will influence your own results.

When judging the success of your own emails it's important to ensure you select relevant criteria and look for incremental improvements in your emails by benchmarking against your own average results. If you'd like to find out more about this, check out our guide to email analytics.

The definitions used in this report are the same as for our previous editions.