Industry Specific Marketing Email Statistics

Are you familiar with industry specific marketing email statistics? I'm normally a temporary expert in this - looking up the stats as I begin to work with a new client. It's always good to know what industry benchmarks are, so we know what we plan to exceed!

Email marketing is an important component of many of the inbound marketing campaigns that we manage for our clients and I'm often asked what open and click-through rates are "good" and what my clients should expect . I've noticed that many still think back to old direct mail open rates or response rates when they think about email stats.

I can remember 2% being a good direct mail rate - 2% conversion. The problem is, many of the clients I used to work with on direct mail did a bad job tracking the responses - mostly the phone calls - they received as a result of their mailings.

2% is an ok conversion rate if in fact that conversion equals a new order or a new client. But in the email marketing world, 2% is low as a click-through rate or initial "conversion."

When recently investigating some email statistics for a medical client, I found this rather helpful article from Constant Contact: Average open, click-through, and bounce rates of Constant Contact customers by industry.

Here are a few highlights for some client categories we work with often (as of the March 2017 Report):

• Financial Advisor: 17.70% open rate / 7.67% click-through
• Health Professional: 17.40% open rate / 6.91% click-through
• Home & Building Services: 15.81% open rate / 4.91% click-through

I find that exceeding these open rate stats is fairly easy. It's all about good headlines on messages going to a qualified list. However, getting good click-through rates is a bigger challenge. We find that it helps to have various link opportunities within your email. Some may be text links, others are images or call-to-action buttons.

Look through these industries and find your industry averages. Then build your email marketing campaigns to exceed to those averages.