Newsletters to small distribution lists are particularly well clicked on

The "Email Marketing Benchmark 2020" study by Episerver is conducted annually for six different industries and is designed to enable marketing managers to compare the key figures of their own email marketing with those of their respective industry. This allows them to develop a sense of how successful their email marketing is compared to their industry. The 2020 benchmark also provides six practical tips on how marketers can improve the performance of their email campaigns.

The average open rate of email campaigns in the "Retail and e-commerce" sector is 31%. It is only surpassed by the open rate in the "Finance, insurance and real estate" sector. Here it reaches 41 percent. On average, the open rate of email campaigns across all sectors surveyed is 29%.

More opens, but fewer clicks

The analysis shows that the open rate increased slightly in 2019 compared to the previous year in all sectors except fashion. On the other hand, click rates generally fell slightly on average compared to 2018. The "B2B", "Finance, insurance and real estate", "Travel and mobility" and "Internet, publishing and software" sectors were an exception. Here, click rates were slightly higher than in the previous year.

The "Finance, insurance and real estate" sector also performed better in terms of click-through rate at 8.9% than the "Retail and e-commerce" sector at 5%. The fashion industry, on the other hand, has the lowest click rate in the industry comparison at 3.3%. The study also revealed that newsletters to small distribution lists are clicked on particularly well. The click-through rate for messages sent to fewer than 2,500 recipients was 6.5% across all sectors.

Three characteristics of subject lines

How long? With personalization elements? With emojis? The design of subject lines is an important factor for the performance of email campaigns. The study took a closer look at three characteristics: the length (by character count), whether a personalization element such as name or place of residence was used and whether symbols or emojis attracted more attention. Some of the results:

• The more concise and shorter the subject line, the better the effect on the unique open rate.
• Across all sectors, the open rate, click rate and effective click rate are higher with personalization than without personalization.
• Symbols and emojis are also being used more and more frequently in email marketing.

With the following six tips, marketers can gain inspiration on how to improve their email marketing from the best practice tips also included in the study:

1. ensure appropriate list hygiene

Of course, you need recipients for successful email marketing, preferably lots of them. However, the recipient list must also be built up and maintained properly so that it does not become a performance killer.

2. measures for sustainable distribution structure

Without new registrations, mailing lists shrink in the long term. Companies can use pop-up layers, for example, to draw the attention of interested parties and customers to their newsletter.

3. increase relevance through personalization

A personal sender, personalized subject lines or individual product recommendations are among the best practices in email marketing today.

4. use "hidden data" to creatively address recipients

There is a lot of "hidden data" that can easily be used for a personalized approach.

5. surprise the recipient (and yourself)

In many cases, the actual behavior of the recipients differs from the expected behavior. If you experiment with appropriate tests, you can learn a lot.

6. optimize performance through successful A/B testing

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. A/B tests are a powerful tool for scrutinizing your own email marketing strategy, newsletter design and personalization.