What email marketing benchmarks really tell you
- Summary:
- Email marketing remains a potent tactic, but only if it's used to win audiences rather than lose them. How do you assess your email success without proper benchmarks? Barb Mosher Zinck looks at recent data from Toshiba and IBM on email marketing benchmarks. and gives her take on how to move forward.
A presentation from the MarketingProfs Email Marketing Virtual Conference hit some crucial points on benchmarking that are worth reviewing. The presentation was by Rachel Miller and Michelle Burson, both Corporate Communication Specialists for Toshiba America Medical Systems, Inc. and was called “Beating the Benchmarks: Email Marketing from the Ground Up.”
A quick Toshiba backstory
Miller and Burson talked about challenges and missed opportunities Toshiba faced with their previous approach to email marketing. Initially, the plan focused on enabling Sales to send their emails, populated by marketing. This made Sales the primary touchpoint, and unfortunately it didn’t work because Sales wasn’t sending many emails. They took the process back into marketing but without a clear strategy and plan they found they were just sending email for the sake of sending email.
Miller and Burson wanted to take a more strategic approach to email marketing. They implemented a four-step plan to get on the right track: Research, Plan, Get Buy in and Measure and Adapt. I’m not going to get into the details of each step of their process; it’s worth registering for the on-demand presentation to hear their full story.
Getting to the right benchmarks
As part of their research, Miller and Burson did a ton of digging for best practices and metrics. And there are a lot out there to find. But for Toshiba, which markets and sells imaging systems to hospitals, doctors, clinicians and so on, it is hard to find reliable external benchmarks that fit their niche.
What they realized is that they had a lot of the data internally from existing email campaigns across the company to establish their internal benchmarks and work against those. With the growing amount of data organizations collect, there are a wealth of hidden insights in your own backyard; you just need to look.
Once they set those benchmarks, what exactly did they do with them? Benchmarks give you something to work against; you usually want to do better, show you have improved, or at a minimum, stay the same. Which means you have to measure.
Open rates and CTRs were good to know, but Miller and Burson wanted to go beyond these basic measurements and understand how the emails were performing. Key questions they wanted to know:
- Why did the person open the email?
- What makes them click?
- What did they do after they clicked?
This required a much deeper dive into the metrics than benchmark reports provide. For each high level question they asked above: open, click and beyond conversion, they dug for more information.
For open rates, they looked at subject line length, day of week, time of day, clear or clever subject lines, subject line topics by product, industry, benefit, and subject line type (question or statement).
For CTRs, they analyzed use of images, concept types, copy word count, CTAs, unsubscribe rates (what were the titles of the people who unsubscribed? Their location?)
To know what readers did after they clicked, Miller and Burson examined time on site, bounce rate; pages visited, device used (mobile or desktop), who clicked/converted (names, titles, demographics - to understand what audiences are/aren’t engaging).
Some things they found doing this analysis? They needed to keep their the body copy word count low (110-120). They also had a rising number of mobile readers, so they adopted a mobile first design. And they refined their lists and sent fewer emails. This refining process increased their open and clickthrough rates and reduced unsubscribes.
The value of external benchmarks
IBM Marketing Cloud released its 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study and there is a lot of data to parse through that can be helpful to organizations in different B2B and B2C industries. The study analyzed open rates, clickthrough rates, list churn metrics such as bounces and unsubscribes, usage and engagement metrics.
For Toshiba, the metrics for the hospitals, healthcare & biotech industry might be useful to know:
- Open rates 26.1%
- Unique clickthroughs 3.5%
- Click to open rate 12.2%
The study doesn’t offer engagement/read rates for this industry because the number of brands in the industry was too small to measure.
So, Toshiba could look at these benchmarks and make assumptions about open rates and clickthrough rates, but this is a broad industry category, and you have to ask yourself honestly how applicable the metrics really are.
If you do decide to use external benchmarks, choose a study that includes a large dataset. A small dataset wouldn’t necessarily be representative of your industry. You also want to be sure the report creator is reputable - industry associations are good, but so are some vendors who have large datasets to analyze.
Look for benchmarks that represent your niche as closely as possible. In many cases they may be hard to find, so keep in mind that if you are going by a big industry, the benchmarks might not tell you that much. Also - look at location because benchmarks vary across geography.
My take
Don’t go by external benchmarks alone. They are a good starting point and can give you an idea where to start, but do like Toshiba and look at internal benchmarking as well. Internal benchmarks come from your existing contact lists and customer base - these numbers will help you understand just how good your email marketing is for current customers and contacts and give you the best insights on how to improve your process.
Internal benchmarks will help you understand what content is resonating, what CTAs get the most clicks and what devices your customers and contacts are currently using to read your emails. And that’s just for starters, as Miller and Burson demonstrated in their presentation.
Email marketing isn’t just for awareness and acquisition. It’s also used for customer retention, and upselling/crosselling, so leveraging internal benchmarks provide the best insights on how you are engaging and converting that audience.
It’s important to understand what other companies in your market are doing. Competitive analysis across the board, not just email marketing, is necessary to help you understand how you need to differentiate yourself and your products, but it should only be a starting point.
It’s the right combination of internal and external benchmarking that will yield the best results. That right mix will be unique to your company.