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Email marketing engagement and response statistics 2018

The best email statistics sources to benchmark open and clickthrough rates for your email campaigns in your industry sector

Email marketers often ask "how do our campaigns compare"? They're looking for email statistics to compare subscriber engagement for open, clickthrough and delivery rates, ideally within their sector.

Fortunately, there are a number of good options to benchmark email response across different sectors. The best stats sources are compilations by email marketing service providers who produce statistics across their clients' campaigns. We have ordered them into the 4 top questions asked:

As we'll see, for the most meaningful comparisons we need to go beyond industry averages and drill down to the comparison of email types since transactional emails such as a welcome sequence tend to have much higher interaction and click-through rates than a regular newsletter.

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Email Statistics - 2018 update

Q1. What are the email engagement rates for small to medium businesses?

We will continue to update these stats through 2018 as new reports are produced by the main email platforms.

The most recent (published April 2018) is the GetResponse Email marketing benchmarks giving a worldwide average of open and clickthrough rates by country and by sector. Here is the sector summary which also includes unsubscribe and spam rates in the full report.

Also recent compilation is the 28th Dec 2017 is the Constant Contact Average Email open and clickthrough rates by industry - click to expand.

Do contact us if you're an email provider with new stats to share. Talking of which... Mailchimp has monthly updates of their Email benchmark stats which give a great source of comparing email response by industry. This Email response data was last updated on 1st February 2017 (no updates in 2018 when we last checked).

Open	Open rate (%)	Clickthrough rate (%)	Soft Bounce	Hard Bounce	Abuse	Unsub
Agriculture and Food Services	24.71%	2.98%	0.58%	0.43%	0.02%	0.29%
Architecture and Construction	24.78%	2.90%	1.50%	1.08%	0.03%	0.36%
Arts and Artists	27.23%	2.85%	0.61%	0.44%	0.02%	0.29%
Beauty and Personal Care	18.48%	1.96%	0.38%	0.38%	0.03%	0.32%
Business and Finance	20.97%	2.73%	0.66%	0.55%	0.02%	0.23%
Computers and Electronics	20.87%	2.16%	1.02%	0.70%	0.02%	0.31%
Construction	22.10%	1.95%	1.56%	1.20%	0.04%	0.43%
Consulting	19.54%	2.26%	0.92%	0.71%	0.02%	0.29%
Creative Services/Agency	22.41%	2.61%	1.09%	0.89%	0.02%	0.38%
Daily Deals/E-Coupons	15.22%	2.39%	0.10%	0.07%	0.01%	0.10%
E-commerce	16.75%	2.32%	0.30%	0.24%	0.02%	0.23%
Education and Training	22.00%	2.63%	0.55%	0.46%	0.02%	0.20%
Entertainment and Events	21.21%	2.33%	0.49%	0.41%	0.02%	0.28%
Gambling	18.75%	3.35%	0.39%	0.46%	0.03%	0.17%
Games	20.82%	3.33%	0.44%	0.50%	0.02%	0.25%
Government	26.33%	3.62%	0.48%	0.39%	0.01%	0.13%
Health and Fitness	21.93%	2.57%	0.43%	0.44%	0.03%	0.39%
Hobbies	28.46%	5.13%	0.31%	0.24%	0.02%	0.23%
Home and Garden	23.82%	3.47%	0.57%	0.40%	0.03%	0.37%
Insurance	21.56%	2.11%	0.76%	0.82%	0.03%	0.26%
Legal	22.49%	2.99%	0.76%	0.67%	0.02%	0.23%
Manufacturing	21.74%	2.33%	1.41%	0.99%	0.03%	0.36%
Marketing and Advertising	17.81%	1.92%	0.77%	0.61%	0.02%	0.28%
Media and Publishing	22.14%	4.70%	0.28%	0.18%	0.01%	0.12%
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare	22.43%	2.42%	0.72%	0.72%	0.03%	0.30%
Mobile	19.43%	2.10%	0.57%	0.63%	0.02%	0.36%
Music and Musicians	22.86%	2.84%	0.56%	0.42%	0.02%	0.29%
Non-Profit	24.98%	2.76%	0.49%	0.40%	0.02%	0.19%
Other	23.06%	2.81%	0.78%	0.60%	0.02%	0.28%
Pharmaceuticals	20.02%	2.51%	0.79%	0.74%	0.02%	0.22%
Photo and Video	25.36%	3.49%	0.71%	0.61%	0.02%	0.40%
Politics	22.23%	2.17%	0.42%	0.38%	0.03%	0.21%
Professional Services	20.89%	2.47%	0.92%	0.72%	0.02%	0.31%
Public Relations	20.12%	1.64%	0.80%	0.60%	0.01%	0.21%
Real Estate	20.84%	1.91%	0.61%	0.51%	0.03%	0.31%
Recruitment and Staffing	20.73%	2.18%	0.53%	0.60%	0.02%	0.32%
Religion	26.46%	3.11%	0.19%	0.17%	0.01%	0.13%
Restaurant	21.17%	1.25%	0.24%	0.22%	0.02%	0.26%
Restaurant and Venue	21.71%	1.33%	0.53%	0.45%	0.02%	0.42%
Retail	20.96%	2.50%	0.35%	0.30%	0.02%	0.28%
Social Networks and Online Communities	21.71%	3.33%	0.37%	0.29%	0.02%	0.23%
Software and Web App	20.95%	2.29%	1.06%	0.85%	0.02%	0.39%
Sports	25.41%	3.19%	0.46%	0.41%	0.02%	0.29%
Telecommunications	21.57%	2.43%	1.13%	0.92%	0.02%	0.27%
Travel and Transportation	20.69%	2.17%	0.65%	0.48%	0.02%	0.24%
Vitamin Supplements	17.26%	1.80%	0.28%	0.22%	0.03%	0.25%

We do have other industry sector breakdowns of response later in this post, but since Constant Constant and Mailchimp send billions of emails a month for more than 10 million users this is probably the largest global sample of email response that has been created. They are skewed to smaller businesses using their free account options, though.

Q2. What are the Email engagement rates for larger businesses?

The results for Mailchimp are more typical of smaller and mid-size businesses, rather than large brands. This Email benchmark compilation from Silverpop who are now owned by IBM so clients tend to represent larger businesses - they are from 750 companies representing 3,000 brands in 40 countries. So breakdowns by EMEA, UK, US and APAC are available too. I've selected the breakdown by industry which is more useful to compare your performance with. There wasn't an update since the takeover, but we're hoping for an update in the stats this year.

But what is the average email open rate? Here are the open rates with the mean showing the variation from the poorest performing sectors like publishing and tech to consumer brands and non-profits.

Email open rates by industry

Rather than click-through rates that are also available in the report, I have picked out Click-to-open which shows engagement with the copy and creative. As a rule of thumb you should look for 10 to 15% CTOR, so can compare emails against this benchmark.

Click to open rate by industry

Finally, from this benchmark, I thought it would be useful to share the data on list churn as indicated by hard bounce rates and spam complaint rates. You don't want to go too high on these since you could have a problem with inbox delivery and likely your ESP will get in touch.

Email complaint rate by country or region

Q3. What is the breakdown of market share for email clients on mobile and desktop?

Litmus, one of the best sources for stats on Email marketing regularly produce a summary of the email experience of different users - this is their start of 2018 round-up of the previous year.

This chart summarising their research shows the rise of mobile email marketing to the point that nearly half of emails are opened on smartphones and tablets.

The latest Litmus compilation of email client market share shows why it's so important to consider how well your emails render on mobile. It's based on the percentage of opens on different platforms. The uptick in webmail opens is again largely due to Gmail defaulting to open images.

Q4. What is a good open and clickthrough rate? How do these differ for different industries?

Although we are presenting averages in this article, to answer this question it's important to go beyond averages in your analysis of your email marketing so you can compare 'apples with apples'. It's worth segmenting your email response in this way:

By Email type (see below)
By offer type
By audience demographics

This will give you a better indication of performance as will analysis by revenue per 1000 emails sent. To show the difference of email type, the GetResponse Email marketing benchmarks include these averages by email opens:

It's no surprise that triggered and autoresponder (welcome) emails have higher open abd click rates since they are more relevant or immediate, more in the context of an action that a subscriber has taken. It shows the power of marketing automation.

Sales Cycle also has some good insight showing response rates for remarketing emails like basket abandons compared to other types of emails in their 2018 Remarketing report.

Across all industries, the average open and clickthrough rate results according to the most recent Sign-up.To Email statistics for UK SME email marketing campaigns were:

Open and click-through rate by sector

Across all industries the average results for UK SME email marketing campaigns were:

Open rate: 24.79% (2016: 24.88%)
Click-through rate: 4.19% (3.42%)
Unsubscription rate: 0.49% (0.52%)
Click-to-open rate: 11.88% (10.88%)
Unsubscribe-to-open rate: 2.59% (2.72%)

This data shows that open rate has had a slight decrease, click-through and click-to-open rates have slightly increased. While unsubscribe-to-open rates showed a slight decrease.

The 2017 report has a relatively small sample of 1.5 billion emails sent by SMBs during 2016.

But it's a useful report since it has the breakdown of opens, clicks and unsubscribes by industry for B2B and B2C markets. This shows the much lower response in some sectors such as Events, Education and Legal services.

There are also statistics on engagement measured as clicked to open - this info isn't always available in these types of benchmarks. It's useful to compare how effective your creative and offers is at to generating clickthroughs.

Click-to-open rate by sector

Finally, the full report also has a sector breakdown on unsubscribe rates. Again a large difference here by sector.

Unsubscribes by sector