NEW YORK—Communicating with customers via e-mail is important, but what are your expectations for the effectiveness of those messages? How often are e-mails opened and clicked through?
HubSpot, the innovative inbound marketing and sales platform, which offers an abundance of guidance and resources to digital marketers in all fields, has some answers in a new report.
To help users better benchmark their e-mail open and click rates, HubSpot pulled some email marketing benchmark data from
HubSpot's 11,500+ customers. Here are some charts and stats to help you figure out what a good open and click rate looks like for the number of e-mail campaigns you send per month, your company size and your business type.
Reports Ginny Soskey of HubSpot, "We all want to know how many targeted e-mail campaigns we should be sending in a month. While we want to stay top-of-mind for our leads and customers, we don't want to overwhelm and annoy. So at what point does e-mail become 'too much'? In our customer base, we've found that companies sending more than 30 e-mail campaigns a month start to see lower e-mail open and click rates. Note: Campaigns are defined as targeted, individual e-mails sent to a portion of a database—not an e-mail blast to everyone."
Soskey reports that the sweet spot is 16 to 30 e-mail campaigns a month. Companies that send 16 to 30 campaigns a month see a click rate more than 2X greater than the click rate of companies that send 2 or fewer campaigns a month. At this frequency, companies enjoy a median open rate of 32.4 percent and median click rate of 6.5 percent.
HubSpot also shows that open rates of B-to-C (business to consumer) and B-to-B (business to business) e-mails are relatively comparable. And, the group's research also reveals the differences among e-mail open and click rates, depending on the size of businesses.
To learn even more about putting together the most effective e-mails for your business, HubSpot offers a free, downloadable report,
The Science of E-mail. This data-rich report sheds light on how people read e-mail (or filter them out), what devices and e-mail client are most often used, which e-mail components can give you the best results including number of images, length of copy, specific words and phrases, and so forth.