After sending an email to your customers, regardless of whether it is a marketing or transactional message, you probably check its effectiveness – including the number of email opens and clicks.
Do you sometimes wonder what statistics would be satisfactory? What would be a "good" result? What would be an average benchmark for performance?
It's hard to answer these questions unequivocally since it all depends on many factors such as the industry in which you operate, your message's subject lines and copy, and how your audience was segmented. But in this article, we provide some average Open Rates (OR) and Click-To-Open Rates (CTOR) that you can use as a reference!
If you are just starting your adventure with email marketing and are not yet familiar with these metrics, here's what they mean:
To summarize, your OR will show you how many people who opened your emails (which is a good proxy for how attractive your messages appear to be), while your CTOR will show you how many people who opened your emails actually were engaged enough to click on a link and go to your website or somewhere else (which is a good proxy for how compelling your message was). |
Enough theory, let's see some actual results!
Average OR and CTOR of newsletters (marketing messages)
We present below the average OR and CTOR obtained by our clients' Newsletters (marketing messages).
The metrics were collected from 100 clients, all located in Poland, over 3 months. In total, 42,450,772 sent emails were taken into account.
First, let's look at the aggregate results:
Average OR = 9.58%
Average CTOR = 13.20%
Now let's see how these statistics look like when broken down by the different types of Newsletters available in our system:
NEWSLETTER TYPE | AVERAGE OR | AVERAGE CTOR |
9.61% | 12.96% | |
9.31% | 15.68% | |
13.62% | 13.87% |
NOTE: A/B Newsletters were excluded from the study due to varying metrics in each message variation, and SMS Newsletters were excluded because they are not email messages.
Now let's check the average OR and CTOR broken down by industry:
INDUSTRY | AVERAGE OR | AVERAGE CTOR |
Shoes | 12.10% | 16.82% |
Clothing | 9.98% | 17.68% |
Cosmetics | 9.97% | 9.52% |
Home & Garden | 12.99% | 13.24% |
Healthcare | 11.84% | 9.69% |
Food & Beverage | 15.97% | 10.30% |
Electronics & Gadgets | 22.50% | 19.00% |
Accessories (bags and jewelry) | 13.96% | 16.39% |
Now let's take a look at the same metrics, but related to automated messages!
Average OR and CTOR of automation scenarios (transactional messages)
This study was also conducted with the same 100 clients as the one looking at Newsletters, during the same 3 month period. In total, 2,369,040 transactional messages sent were taken into account.
Let's start with the aggregate results:
Average OR = 26.20%
Average CTOR = 20.06%
Now let's see how these metrics look like when broken down by the top 5 most used automation scenarios:
SCENARIO | AVERAGE OR | AVERAGE CTOR |
18.31% | 17.65% | |
32.75% | 27.14% | |
24.59% | 20.75% | |
43.69% | 16.47% | |
28.52% | 18.45% |
NOTE: The Newsletter Subscription scenario, although widely used, was excluded from this study because it involves the Double Opt-in emails which usually have extremely high Open Rates.
Conclusion
So, how do your current Open Rates and Click-To-Open Rates look like in comparison to these averages?
If your results are similar or higher, that's great! You can try looking for ways to improve them even more. If they are lower, it is probably a good idea to review of Email Marketing strategy and look for ways to improve your email deliverability. Click here to read 18 tips on how to do this!
Need more help?
If you have any further questions about your messages' Open Rates and Click-To-Open Rates, please do not hesitate to contact us at hello@edrone.me