Data is the foundation of good email marketing. We are constantly reviewing what is considered good or bad performance metrics. Here we review: Acoustic’s 2019 Benchmarking report for smarter marketing.

Key insights

Open rates and click-through rates continue to grow

Since 2014, open rates and click-through rates (CTRs) have increased steadily each
year — with the biggest jump in 2018.

The steady rise in rates are likely a combination of two factors:

1. brands are focusing more on list hygiene and high quality subscribers (perhaps due to the influence of various data and privacy related regulations)
2. Messages are more relevant due to the increased use of behaviour- and preference-based.

Transactional messages attract the most engagement

Open rates for transactional emails dropped ever so slightly from 2017 to 2018, but top quartile rates are still above 73% and mean is nearly 44% —20 percentage points higher than non transactional emails (promotional, newsletters, etc.).

The fact that these rates are relatively unchanged could indicate that consumers appear to value messages that are highly relevant and triggered by their own behaviour. As the most engaged emails your brand will send, these emails should be owned and optimized by marketing for a superior customer experience and maximum promotional and revenue-generating opportunity.

Mobile email engagement powers down

What’s up with mobile emails? Not their engagement. Overall and across several of the largest geographic regions, the percentage of email recipients opening emails on mobile devices has declined. (It has grown just slightly in the US.) The application increasing in usage is largely webmail, such as Gmail or Yahoo.

This shift might simply be a result of consumers increasingly using their mobile devices more for general inbox maintenance (such as quickly identifying and deleting messages in which they have no interest) versus opening and engaging with the important messages via email clients on their laptop or desktop computer as well as via webmail.

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