The UK Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Update: The 2010 version of the email marketing benchmark report is now available!

It's only natural to compare - we all want to know how we're doing relative to everyone else! That's why we've produced this, our first ever large-scale report on average email marketing performance for small to medium sized businesses in various UK industries.

There are several reports already available but we found they were either based on US data or focused on massive corporations - neither of which are of much relevance to most of our customers, most of whom are UK based SME's.

Before we get to the detail of the report, a quick reminder that these are averages and there are a huge range of factors that influence campaigns: content, audience relationship, timing etc. so whilst these figures are a good general indicator, your results almost certainly will vary.

How did we compile this report?

This report is based on more than 216,000,000 emails sent by UK based Sign-Up.to clients in the 12 months to 31st July 2009. We've only included emails from clients who opted-in to our stats comparison service and who declared their industry type. We've removed any industries with less than 450,000 sends so that the averages are more robust and where relevant we've merged several categories together.

Defining terms

Before we begin, we'll define some of the terms we're using as several of these figures can (and often are!) calculated in different ways across the email marketing industry.

All figures we use are based on unique user actions - i.e. we only count the same recipient opening a campaign once, if they open that campaign again we don't count that as another open.

• Open Rate: the percentage of delivered emails that were opened (measured by an image load or link click); i.e. number opened / (total sent - bounces)
• Clicks: the percentage of delivered emails that had a link clicked; i.e. unique clicks / (total sent - bounces)
• Unsubscribes: the percentage of delivered emails that result in an unsubscription; i.e. unsubscribes / (total sent - bounces)

For some of the reports we use different ratios, as these are a better way to compare some aspects of campaign performance - these are:

• Click to Open: the percentage of opened emails that had a link clicked; i.e. unique clicks / opens
• Unsubscribe to Open: the percentage of opened emails that result in an unsubscription; i.e. unsubscribes / opens

We use these 'x to Open' figures as ways to compare the performance of the actual campaign content because these look at what happens after the first objective of someone actually opening the campaign has been achieved.

Now that we're clear about what we mean, lets get on to the results!

Opens, Clicks and Unsubscribes by industry type:

Easily the most requested information, this graph shows average results broken down by industry type.

Unsurprisingly New Media companies (websites, web services etc.) perform strongly. Perhaps more surprising is the very strong performance of Government (both local and national) campaigns but these tend to be very well thought out, informational campaigns with clear calls to action.

Some industries show lower open rates as a result of tending towards more text-based campaigns (unless a user loads images or clicks a link we can't record an open) - Events is a good example of this.

Who has the best performing campaigns?

This is tough to say as it depends on the desired goal of the campaign. For informational campaigns where there's no click through to a website Open Rate is the clearest indicator, for those who want to direct users to their website then clicks is the clear goal.

To more fairly compare the impact of campaign content (and discount other factors like subject line wording) we compared the Click to Open rate for the same industries, shown in the graph below.

Here we can see that for Publishing and B2C Retail over 25% of the people who open their emails end up clicking through to their website - a good indicator that their content is well tuned for their audience.

What about subscriber loyalty?

Unsubscription rate is probably the best long-term indicator of how well an organisation is engaging with its clients. A high rate indicates that something is definitely wrong! Our unsubscription figures include those people who remove themselves by clicking the 'This is spam' button which many of the major ISP's have introduced.

The graph below shows both 'standard' Unsubscription Rate and Unsubscription to Open rate, which is arguably a better indicator of how well the actual content of the campaign is being received.

The good news is that for all industries the general unsubscription rate is well below 1%; however, the data also shows that several industries clearly have a higher churn rate than others and could perhaps benefit from segmenting their mailings more and perhaps revising their content somewhat.

That's it for the first edition of the report, we hope you've found it useful.

Like to know more about how you can improve your email marketing campaigns?
Check out our tips on our blog and our other guides.

If you've got a particular question about email marketing statistics that you'd like answering then please get in touch and we'll do our best to answer it!