The 2012 email marketing benchmark report
The 2012 edition of our Email Benchmark Report was compiled from data on over 900 million permission-based emails sent through the Sign-Up.to 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.
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.
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.
Averages are a good place to start when benchmarking your own performance, but there are many factors which will influence your own results.
The definitions used in this report are the same as for our previous editions.
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. Results were collected from over 900 million email messages sent between 1st January and 31st December 2011.
| Opens | Clicks | Unsubs | Click to Open |
Unsub to Open |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B2B Sales | 26.14% | 2.48% | 0.33% | 9.48% | 1.26% |
| B2B Services | 17.03% | 2.13% | 0.31% | 12.52% | 1.82% |
| B2C Retail | 18.34% | 3.44% | 0.19% | 18.73% | 1.02% |
| Charity | 23.25% | 3.32% | 0.28% | 14.29% | 1.21% |
| Education/Training | 17.17% | 2.16% | 0.33% | 12.57% | 1.94% |
| Events | 13.02% | 1.48% | 0.12% | 11.39% | 0.91% |
| Fashion | 12.73% | 1.37% | 0.23% | 10.78% | 1.84% |
| Finance | 18.32% | 2.18% | 0.20% | 11.91% | 1.09% |
| Government | 31.17% | 7.97% | 0.08% | 25.56% | 0.27% |
| Health | 18.75% | 2.81% | 0.30% | 14.96% | 1.61% |
| HR | 16.00% | 2.18% | 0.56% | 13.61% | 3.51% |
| Industrial | 19.10% | 2.33% | 0.30% | 12.19% | 1.56% |
| IT | 15.15% | 2.30% | 0.67% | 15.20% | 4.44% |
| Legal | 17.54% | 2.74% | 0.45% | 15.63% | 2.59% |
| Music | 21.46% | 2.93% | 0.23% | 13.64% | 1.07% |
| New Media | 20.91% | 8.39% | 0.07% | 40.13% | 0.36% |
| PR | 18.08% | 1.43% | 0.35% | 7.92% | 1.94% |
| Property | 11.34% | 1.55% | 0.27% | 13.69% | 2.35% |
| Publishing | 13.79% | 1.99% | 0.06% | 14.39% | 0.41% |
| Restaurants | 23.67% | 4.71% | 0.23% | 19.90% | 0.98% |
| Sales/Marketing | 16.57% | 2.18% | 0.24% | 13.13% | 1.43% |
| Sport/Leisure | 16.50% | 2.94% | 0.14% | 17.82% | 0.82% |
| Travel | 15.93% | 2.41% | 0.18% | 15.16% | 1.11% |
| Average | 18.35% | 2.95% | 0.15% | 15.42% | 0.97% |
2012 Benchmark Report - PDF download
We've made our report available as a handy print-out-and-keep, or save-for-later PDF version.
To receive your free copy, simply complete the form below.