Open rate, click through rate and unsubscriptions by industry
Overall averages remain very similar to the results of our 2010 report with a small 0.23% increase in open rate and a slight decrease in click-through rate of 0.27%. An encouraging story given the endless 'death of email' articles we've seen recently.
Looking at individual industry open rates, the biggest gain over 2010 was made by B2B Sales, with an uplift of 5.65%, followed by Sales/Marketing with 3.24% and Restaurants with 2.69%. Interesting to see that B2B categories are seeing the strongest gains, in our last report it was B2C which saw the sharpest rises.
The biggest gain in click-through rates was seen in the New Media category, with a substantial increase of 2.55%. This brings that category level with Government, the previous top-performer for this metric.
Unsubscription rates remained satisfyingly low across the board, suggesting that email marketers are continuing to engage their subscribers with relevant content and aren't suffering from high levels of attrition.
Building on these raw statistics we can now delve deeper into loyalty and relevancy in the next section of this report by examining click-to-open and unsubscribe-to-open rates.
Unsubscription-to-Open and Click-to-Open Rates
This chart gives a deeper insight into campaign performance by looking at actions performed after a campaign has been opened. This put the focus on the actual campaign content - its design and relevancy to the recipients - and removes factors which influence open rate, like subject line and sender details.
When comparing click-to-open rates it's important to remember that different types of email campaign will have different objectives - driving a click-through may not always be the goal of a campaign.
Open-to-unsubscribe rates are a good indicator of relevancy of content and strength of subscriber engagement. A rate of 1-1.5% is within the expected range and most sectors fall within this but as the results below show a few sectors like IT and Fashion may need to take a closer look at their engagement strategies!
Email engagement and reader loyalty Rates
This chart shows an indication of the level of engagement that the email campaigns themselves generate, by looking at the proportion of people who click on a campaign after opening it.
To measure reader loyalty, we look at the ratio of unsubscriptions to opens - a good indicator of the relevance of a campaign to the audience. Unsubscription rate alone is a useful measure but doesn't take into account people who simply discard messages without ever opening them - the worst possible result for an email marketeer!
Raw Data
Here's the raw aggregate data used to generate the graphs used in our benchmark reports. All of these figures have been calculated using our defined methodology and results were collected from over 500 million email messages sent between 1st January and 31st December 2010.
|
| Opens |
Clicks |
Unsubs |
Click to Open |
Open to Unsub |
|---|
| B2B Sales | 22.19% |
2.30% |
0.25% |
10.36% |
1.13% |
|---|
| B2B Services | 15.30% |
2.61% |
0.47% |
17.04% |
3.10% |
|---|
| B2C Retail | 19.40% |
4.80% |
0.24% |
24.74% |
1.26% |
|---|
| Charity | 21.96% |
2.80% |
0.40% |
12.73% |
1.83% |
|---|
| Education/Training | 15.08% |
1.50% |
0.39% |
9.93% |
2.58% |
|---|
| Events | 11.60% |
0.69% |
0.29% |
5.93% |
2.53% |
|---|
| Fashion | 12.90% |
1.59% |
0.50% |
12.35% |
3.90% |
|---|
| Finance/Insurance | 19.28% |
2.28% |
0.22% |
11.84% |
1.12% |
|---|
| Government | 35.60% |
9.08% |
0.10% |
25.51% |
0.29% |
|---|
| Health/Beauty | 22.07% |
4.30% |
0.32% |
19.50% |
1.47% |
|---|
| HR/Recruitment | 18.55% |
0.65% |
0.22% |
3.51% |
1.21% |
|---|
| Industrial/Manufacturing | 19.88% |
3.35% |
0.34% |
16.87% |
1.69% |
|---|
| IT
|
11.68%
| 0.88% |
0.62% |
7.50% |
5.33% |
|---|
| Legal/Accounting | 21.46% |
2.36% |
0.28% |
10.98% |
1.32% |
|---|
| Music | 21.32% |
4.70% |
0.19% |
22.05% |
0.88% |
|---|
| New Media | 21.15% |
6.68% |
0.44% |
31.60% |
2.06% |
|---|
| PR | 19.77% |
1.51% |
0.10% |
7.62% |
0.49% |
|---|
| Property | 9.58% |
0.88% |
0.14% |
9.23% |
1.51% |
|---|
| Publishing | 16.26% |
3.97% |
0.07% |
24.40% |
0.43% |
|---|
| Restaurants | 25.50% |
6.14% |
0.25% |
24.08% |
0.99% |
|---|
| Sales/Marketing | 20.03% |
1.68% |
0.30% |
8.37% |
1.51% |
|---|
| Sport/Leisure | 16.46% |
3.07% |
0.12% |
18.62% |
0.75% |
|---|
| Travel
|
16.07% |
2.64% |
0.11% |
16.43% |
0.71% |
|---|