Email Benchmarks - Where do you stand?

Editor's Notes

• #2: Update with new cover from visual brand deck.
• #6: You go back to your desk and start fumbling around random marketing websites with “best practice” campaign performance stats. After an hour of research you’re just left with more questions. Are these stats relevant or even reliable? What should I be doing differently? How do I compare to my peers?
• #7: Marketo Institute was started in 2014 by Marketo Co-founder Jon Miller. We are sitting on a mountain of customer data.
• #9: Think of this as yelling over a megaphone at the mall, you want everyone to hear what you’re saying, doesn’t matter who it is.
• #10: Think of this as passing notes to your crush in class, your personalized love notes are meant for their eyes only, and serve a very specific purpose, to make them like you.
• #11: Think of this as the last interaction you had with a friend. You’re not just talking, but you’re also listening, reading behavior, analyzing and reacting.
• #14: Here’s the data, top is average click rate, bottom is average click to open rate. The blue lines are batch, green are nurture, and orange are trigger. This is the average across all Marketo customers emails for 1 year. Trigger emails perform 3x better than any other email type. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that’s done trigger emails. The power of personalized messages based on behavior is powerful. Imagine looking at a pair of shoes online, you add it to the shopping cart but decide not to buy, an hour later you get an email for 25% off that exact pair of shoes! Serendipity telling you to buy those shoes? No, sorry, just intelligent marketing. Nurture emails perform around the same as batch emails. This one is surprising. My initial guess would have been that nurture emails performed much better than batch (especially for click-to-open) simply due to the fact that they are targeted towards a specific audience for a specific buying stage. But then I thought about how my past companies did nurturing; basically forcing a target audience down a pre-determined linear funnel, rinse and repeat. This is no different than a series of segmented, pre-timed batch emails, and the data shows it.
• #17: Nurture emails CAN perform better than batch. The results were so surprising I decided to take a look at how our (Marketo’s) demand gen team does email campaigns. I found out our nurture emails perform MUCH better than our batch. But this takes time and resources, you have to really know your segmented audience, the messaging has to be really relevant, and you have to utilize a ton of content. Bad nurture programs act like batch and blast; good nurtures are built for the long term and takes time to realize results. That’s why it’s called “drip campaign” not “firehose campaign” I’m going to make all of my emails trigger-based! Creating a trigger campaign for EVERY possible prospect interaction is impractical (unless you’re Amazon or have the budget of Amazon), so just focus on the important ones. Look at your key lead drivers and put some email intelligence behind the behaviors you’re interested in. Good examples are for later buying stage programs such as shopping cart abandonment or visiting a pricing page for a car, with several personalized triggers around pushing the purchase to actually happening. Why do batch emails at all? Batch emails are the cheapest, quickest ways to communicate to your audience. There’s definitely a time and place for batch and blast. If you’re still using batch emails to push your buyers through their buying journey then you should definitely consider focusing more resources on other email types.
• #20: Here’s email send size against unsubscribe rate. Each dot represents an email send from a customer. I’ve cut off the data at 1M email sizes because everything above that becomes a unique special case. In fact, if you notice it’s actually the opposite affect. Larger email sends actually have lower unsubscribe. Probably because companies with large database sends has a more well known brand name and are more careful with their email campaigns. I think the opposite is true and there are many “experimental” small email sends that are sent to “unknown” contacts.
• #23: Here’s email send size against click to open rate. This myth is true, very true. At least for email sends lower than 300k. You see a huge drop-off at around 20,000 to 50,000 where email sizes above that rarely are able to reach higher than 20%. This makes a lot of sense if you think of content relevance. More segmented email sends with more targeted messaging of course will get more clicks.
• #25: Email volume size doesn’t affect unsubscribe rate. However many other factors such as frequency, content and relevance does. Think of your everyday email behavior, if it’s annoying and irrelevant, I’m going to take the extra effort to unsubscribe. Data is really compelling for this one. After 20,000 you start seeing the click-to-open band narrow to 3-18%. It’s very rare to escape that band. The main takeaway here is to find a good balance between how you segment and how relevant your content is. As long as you resonate with the recipient you will get good email performance. It’s just very difficult to stay relevant beyond a certain audience size.
• #27: Update with new cover from visual brand deck.