Despite the emergence of new communication channels, email remains king.

Email still drives the highest ROI out of all B2B marketing strategies. On average, businesses can earn $44 for every dollar spent on email marketing.

Although every business is different and it’s always “it depends”, it’s important to know how your email marketing results compare to your competitors and other businesses in your industry. This will help you determine, for instance, what kind of open rates or conversion rates businesses like yours should expect.

Email marketing open and click-through rates by industry

To get the average industry standards, Mailchimp tracked email campaigns with at least 1,000 recipients and scanned over hundreds of millions of emails delivered through their systems.

The average open rate across all industries is at 21.80%, and the average click-through rate is 2.78%. However, you need to know the average open and click-through rates for your specific industry instead of basing it on the overall average rates because it varies per industry.

For instance, the arts and artists, government, architecture, agriculture and food, and non-profit industries demonstrate an above-average open rate. On the other hand, the media and publishing, government, photo, and video have exemplary click-through rates.

Email marketing open, click-through, and conversion rates by email type

Remarkety studied the metrics of email campaigns of a wide range of e-commerce businesses under their platform.

Here are the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates you can expect depending on the type of email you’re sending. Note that this particular study defined conversion rate as the percentage of how many people place an order within three days of opening or clicking an email.

Major factors that affect email marketing conversion rates

Email responsiveness

More than 55% of emails were opened on a mobile device. On weekends, the rate rises to 60%.

If your emails aren’t responsive, then the effort you put on your email design and layout will all be for naught, as 70% of email recipients will delete an email immediately if it’s not mobile friendly. People are busy enough and won’t have the patience to deal with less-than-perfect email design.

Likewise, many people will simply trash an email if the text is in an unreadable font or if they have to zoom in for it to be readable.

Segmentation and personalization

Segmenting your email list will help you personalize your email message, and ensure that your offer is tailored to the specific B2B buyer you’re sending the email to. By personalizing your email according to their interests and specific stage in the buyer journey, you can better convince your email recipient to convert.

Marketers report a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns.

Email subject line

Your email subject line is crucial to getting your emails opened. After the sender name, it’s the first thing an email recipient reads when they’re sifting through their inbox.

47% of users open an email based on the subject line. If you want to increase your email open rates, optimizing your subject line should be your first course of action.

List health and size

Your campaign size may be big, but your conversion rate may be extremely small due to poor email list health. Research shows that open rates and conversion rates tend to fall as email marketing lists become bigger.

You may also notice that your bounce rate is high, which means that a large portion of your email list is not getting your email at all. It may be due to network problems, full mailbox, or invalid email address. You can address this by doing a little list spring-cleaning every now and then.

Value offer

When you’re not achieving positive conversion rates, take a second look at your content. Are you highlighting the value of your offer? Are you thinking about your customers’ points of view? Is it clear how the recipient will benefit from taking action?

Landing pages

It could be that your landing page doesn’t make it easy for users to sign up or purchase your product, or that you’re asking for too much information. These mistakes can create unnecessary barriers for your potential customers, which is never good. So, make sure you’re implementing landing page best practices for best results.

Conclusion

When you set a goal for your email marketing campaign, you need to base it on industry standards. If you’re getting higher than the industry standards provided above, then you and your team are implementing email marketing well. Not to say that you can’t still improve, but it’s always nice to know that you’re a step ahead of the competition.

Another effective strategy is to make sure that you’re sending from a real person’s email address ([email protected]) instead of a [email protected] email. Your recipients need to know that a professional from your organization is sending them.

Verify and clean up your email list to increase your delivery rate and segment your list carefully. Make sure to craft a compelling subject line and personalize your content by highlighting your value offer creatively—making it difficult for your customers to pass up your email.

Email Marketing Conversion Rate Comparison

PS. Besides all of the above, make sure that you have good deliverability and that your email tool’s IPs are not on the spam blacklists. It sometimes happens when other users of an email platform are using it for less noble reasons.