Good to Know Email Marketing Benchmarks
Email marketing still has the highest ROI
Some trends come and go, but one thing doesn’t seem to change. Email still has the highest ROI of all online marketing channels! Every $1 you spend on email marketing will make you over $44 on average. This 440% return on investment rate seems to be a huge, almost unbelievable number for many. But do companies really care about ROI numbers? I think that there are only a few businesses which measure email ROI properly, since in many cases it can be really tricky to follow the steps and especially value of a conversion from email.
Before you dig deeper into email marketing always make sure that you can measure your ROI properly, since if you don’t know how much money you make how will you decide how much to invest?
25% of digital revenue comes from email
image source: Listrak.com
Although email has the highest ROI but you still have to use other online marketing channels effectively. This is why setting up a proper, well thought online marketing strategy should be the first step for all businesses.
In our region – Central Eastern Europe – there are many old small businesses who do some kind of online marketing. They mostly use PPC, they admire SEO (but don’t really know how it works), they heard that social media is the king, and email marketing is dying. We hope that this is only a local issue, and businesses are smarter around the world and have already built up an online marketing strategy. If not, don’t worry. You are not the only one, but don’t procrastinate more, the time has come!
Conversion rates vary by campaign type
image source: Listrak.com
The more you know about your subscriber the more likely you will make them convert with your email campaign. Personalization is the key to higher conversions, so always make sure to use and examine all the data you have about your subscribers before sending them an email.
Experiment with weekend email campaigns
Many companies – especially in B2B – see a huge drop in their website visits during the weekends, but benchmarks show that weekends have slightly higher open rates (14.33% compared to 14.21%), conversion rates (3.54% compared to 3.41%) and also higher revenue per email ($0.6 to $0.5).
If you are not sending email campaigns in weekends already you should definitely make a try!
Open and click through rates vary during the day
image source: Listrak.com
Surprisingly 3 PM seems to be the ideal time of the day to send email campaigns. But will it work for you also? Who knows. Go and test it!
We send our email campaigns at 5:00 PM, which means 9:00 AM and 7:00 AM in the US. Maybe we will try Mailchimp’s time wrap feature and experiment with all the above mentioned times and maybe even a late night date.
Be careful: Benchmarks are tricky!
What works for the “average” tend to work for nobody. Since email is a really segmented market, everything depends on your industry, subscribers, type of business, email history and tons of other factors.
Benchmarks show a great ballpark value and may help you to have general understanding of your metrics, but don’t worry if your numbers vary from any of the above. Never be satisfied with what you have! There’s always room for improvement, even if you are much better than the average!