Benchmarking for Email Marketing

Written by Andrew Kordek | Oct 23, '21

Welcome to a new digital marketing series at iPost called "Don't do this, do that.", where some of the best minds in email marketing will use dozens of years of both client, agency, and ESP experience to guide you the email marketer with pragmatic advice to help improve your marketing strategy.

This week's article is about Benchmarking.

What Is Benchmarking?

First, let's start with some definitions. According to Wikipedia, " Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies."

Benchmark is defined as an object, such as a ruler or standard, used as a measure of size, accuracy, or quality. So if you're comparing yourself to others in an effort to improve your own processes and results, that's benchmarking.

If it's not comparative, then it's likely another version of benchmarking. Benchmark is also used as a verb - meaning to compare yourself to others on performance metrics.

Benchmark Studies for Email Marketing

It seems like you cannot go a quarter without hearing from a variety of vendors around their benchmark studies surrounding email marketing channels. Typically, these studies are used as lead generation for small businesses' sales teams because we as marketers are obsessed with numbers and, more importantly, are curious as to how we compare to others.

The enormous ego boost we get when we look at the benchmark emails numbers and know we beat them causes us to peacock around in meetings and add it as a line to our resume when we want a bigger and better job.

However, suppose we are below the benchmarks. In that case, we like quickly question the statistical significance and the sample size, all to discredit that particular study to make us feel better.

Either way, benchmark esp studies make us want to feel good about our email campaigns, and that my fellow email marketer is a slippery slope.

Benchmarking Studies Serve a Purpose

Benchmark studies serve a purpose for the vendor but not for the industry as a whole.

First, vendors might use Open, Click rate or bounce rates numbers but calculate them differently, and in most cases, these studies don't typically tell you how they calculate their open or clicks. Yes, vendors (iPost included) have their way of calculating an open or click rate, so it's crucial to align the study calculations with your business.

Second, as mentioned above, these studies often serve as a lead generation tool for their sales team, and while I am not personally against that, you as the marketer should be aware of it.

Use Caution, Don't Obsess

Over the years, I have been asked by marketers how they compare to others in their industry, and while I am always happy to oblige with numbers, I also caution clients not to obsess over them.

If you want something to obsess over, then benchmark yourself from the past years of data that you have and strive to exceed one or many metrics year over year as your program grows. If you look at a benchmark study and notice that your open rate isn't on par with the average open rate for your industry, who cares?

Companies don't make money on open rates, and in my opinion, the open rate is the weakest metric for you to obsess over.

It is time for you to make a commitment in 2022 and beyond to look at the last 3-5 years of your program's engagement numbers and create your benchmark study. It will save you from potentially misleading stats as a way to make you feel good.

Conclusion

These benchmarks can act as valuable tools in evaluating your own email marketing practices and improving efficiency. When it comes to benchmarking, no one is perfect. Use these metrics to identify best practices that will help you improve your own email marketing strategy.

We hope you found that benchmarks can be helpful and serve a purpose but you don't necessarily need to obsess over them. If there’s anything else you would like us to research or study, please don’t hesitate to ask! We love hearing about other people’s ideas and suggestions.

Until next time, happy benchmarking!

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