Email Marketing Benchmarks For Online Publishers (2024)

Let’s not beat around the bush here. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to email marketing benchmarks. Some industries will have wildly different benchmarks to others. E-commerce will have different benchmarks to government emails, for instance. But when it comes to email marketing benchmarks for online publishers, here’s what we’ve found…

If your reports show you dropping much below these numbers, start taking action.

As you can see, in publishing, we have a lower than average open rate, but the typical interaction seen within publishing newsletters is better than average. This data will give you a broad overview of how your own campaigns are performing.

What To Do If You’re Missing Benchmarks

What should you do if you’re not hitting these benchmarks, or if your stats are starting to drop out of these rages?

Rather than panicking, simply take some practical steps to adjust your strategy to bring your numbers back within the expected ranges. Once you’ve made the necessary changes, you should expect to be able to get your numbers back to “normal” within a month or two, depending on how aggressive you are with these steps.

Fix Low Open Rates

• Review Your Sender Reputation: Use tools like Google Postmaster Tools to keep an eye on your sender reputation. Ensure your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentications are set up correctly. And test your emails to ensure they’re not landing in spam.
• Spice Up Your Subject Lines: Play around with different subject line styles to see what really clicks with your audience. Experiment with A/B testing to find out whether a straightforward offer or a question that piques curiosity works better.
• Segment Your List: Break down your audience into smaller groups and customize your emails to fit their specific interests. Personal touches can boost how many people decide to open your emails.
• Experiment with Send Times: Dive into your data to figure out the prime time your subscribers are checking their emails. Don’t be afraid to test out new sending schedules or days.
• Clean Your List: If none of the above works, more ruthlessly clean your list. If anyone hasn’t opened in, say, 4-6 months, send them through a reactivation sequence, and if that doesn’t get them to open your emails, remove them from your list (this is especially important if your open rate drops below 20-25%).

Fix Low Click Rates (CTR and CTOR)

• Upgrade Your Email Content: If clicks are what you’re actually after, make sure your emails pack a punch with content that’s both relevant and valuable to your readers. Don’t hide your call-to-action. Make these CTAs clear and compelling.
• Get Personal with Better Targeting: Lean into segmentation and personalization to make every email feel like it was written just for the reader. Dive into your ESP’s features to see what options are available here.
• Improve Your Design: Ensure your emails look great on any device and catch the eye with standout buttons for your CTAs. Don’t forget to test your emails in dark mode, and across various email clients (Litmus has a great paid-for tool for this).

Fix High Unsubscribe Rates

• Find the Right Email Schedule: If you’re bombarding your subscribers with too many emails, think about dialing it back. Better yet, let them pick how often they hear from you.
• Keep Your Content on Point: Always aim to deliver content that’s both engaging and relevant. Consider sending out a quick survey to get a better idea of what your audience really wants.
• Let Subscribers Set Their Preferences: Introduce a preferences page where people can fine-tune what they receive from you, from the types of emails to how often they land in their inbox.
• Attract Different Subscribers: A high unsubscribe rate may mean the wrong people are signing up to your newsletter. Consider changing your lead magnets to something more relevant. If you’re using online ads, try to improve the audience targeting.

Fix High Bounce Rates

• Tidy Up Your Email List: Make it a regular task to clear out any email addresses that are no longer valid or active to keep your list in top shape. If you can’t fully automate this, we’d recommend doing this monthly.
• Verify Emails on the Fly: Implement email validation tools (such as Hunter, ZeroBounce, and NeverBounce) right at the point of collection to catch any typos and ensure you’re only adding good addresses to your list. You can have your IT team use an API to implement this process. These tools can check email syntax, domain validity, and more.
• Keep an Eye on Your Sender Reputation: Regularly check your sender score to make sure it’s not the reason your emails aren’t reaching inboxes. Stick to the email marketing best practices for keeping your domain reputation sparkling, and keep a close eye on Google Postmaster Tools to understand how Gmail is judging your emails.

Email Benchmarks For Online Publishers

By keeping one eye on these email marketing benchmarks, and the other eye on your own campaign performance, you should be able to continually make adjustments to keep your stats within these benchmark ranges. Good luck!