It’s been a wild couple of years for email marketers. Sure, you could say that about pretty much everything, but it feels particularly true in the email marketing world, where we have seen some unprecedented statistics and monumental technological changes. We’re here to make sense of it all with our 2022 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report. This report will give you better insight into how your emails should be performing relative to others in your industry, and what you can do to improve those metrics. Whether you’re wondering if your click-through rates (CTR) are too low, or your unsubscribe rate is too high, you’ll find the answer here in this report. We’ll also dive into some best practices for improving engagement and measuring your results as you go throughout this year.
How we gathered our data
If you’re not familiar, Campaign Monitor is part of the Marigold family of brands. Together, we make up one of the largest email marketing companies in the Brazil phone number data world. For this report, we analyzed over 100 billion emails sent across our platforms in 2021 to give you the most comprehensive benchmark data and email marketing stats to date.
Email benchmarks by industry
We’re constantly asked what a good open rate or click-through rate is for email. The short answer is, it depends. Those types of key engagement metrics can vary widely based on your industry (as you can see), and other factors. Looking at these metrics, it’s easy to spot some trends as they relate to events of the past year. The Education industry, for example, has the highest open rate, and the highest click-through rate at 28.5% and 4.4%, respectively. This makes sense, as schools needed to communicate with their students & parents more than ever for things like policies for COVID.
We’re seeing the effects of Mail Privacy Protection
While it may not seem like much on the surface, those swings in average open rate across all industries (up 3.5% year-over-year), and click-to-open rate (down 3.6%) are pretty significant! And it turns out, there’s a reason for it. In our last report, Government & Politics Country List took the top spot, which makes sense, given that 2020 was a huge election year in the US. Retail is an interesting one to note. As an industry, it holds the title for both lowest open rate by industry (17.1%), and the biggest jump in open rate year-over-year, up 4.5%. Real Estate, Design, & Construction has the highest click-to-open rate at 17.2% — no doubt riding the real estate boom in 2021.
