Open rates

Silverpop’s report shows unique open rates by industry, revealing that if around one-fifth of recipients open your emails then you’re doing an okay job.

A number of industries achieve average open rates of 25%, including non-profits, consumer services and education, while healthcare just pips them all with a mean score of 26.2%.

At the other end of the scale, travel & leisure achieved a mean open rate of just 15% while media & publishing achieved 16.6%.

Unique open rate by industry

It’s worth noting, however, that open rate alone is a fairly rudimentary and unreliable measurement of success.

For instance, it doesn’t capture all opens accurately due to image blocking and other factors.

Click-through rate

A more reliable metric of success is email clickthrough rate (CTR), though this is still not a substitute for campaign goals such as conversions, revenue or order value.

Looking at industry benchmarks, the usual suspects are again among the top performers, as one would expect.

Non-profits, education, healthcare and consumer services are the only industries to achieve a CTR of 4%, while travel and media are again the lowest performers.

Clickthrough rate by industry

The click-to-open rate (CTOR) is a more useful metric as it measures CTR as a percentage of messages opened rather than messages delivered.

This means email marketers get a more accurate view of how engaging their content is.

Results by industry show that top-quartile performers far surpassed their counterparts, notching CTORs that more than tripled the overall median rate and were about 15 times higher than the bottom performers.

Click-to-open rate by industry

To download the Silverpop Benchmark go here