benchmark report 2017 - strategic email marketing provider€¦ · content bounce rate 0.22% 0.77%...

communicatorcorp.com | @CommCorp

Benchmark Report 2017Comparing stats from 2016

communicatorcorp.com | @CommCorpcommunicatorcorp.com | @CommCorp

Welcome to the latest Communicator Benchmark Report, analysing over 3 billion emails sent in 2016 across 17 sectors.

Following on from last year’s report, we’ve collated the stats and created this easily digestible deck to review and pick out the key information that’s relevant for you.

We’ve highlighted our key findings from last year to give you the best possible insight into your activity and to help you benchmark this against other businesses.

Welcome


Why Benchmark?As marketers, we can fall into the habit of measuring performance on a campaign by campaign basis. Benchmarking across your sector and against your competition is an effective way to take a step back to look at the bigger picture, giving you wider insight when looking to secure budget and plan future activity.

We’d encourage you to use this report to highlight areas of focus for the year ahead. This, combined with mapping your ambition on our Sophistication Scale, will provide you with a strong action plan for the year ahead and will enable you to take an accurate measurement of your performance.

At a glance…

Basic personalisation is becoming less effective

This is a new trend for 2017. As consumers’ expectations rise, your level of personalisation sophistication needs to match. First name personalisation no

longer cuts the mustard!

Year on year email sends have significantly increased

By 1.8million to be precise, taking our average number of emails sent per

customer to a whopping 6.3 million in 2016. Nothing surprising here, email

continues to work!

Automated emails continue to outperform non-recurring

emails (by 75%!)

Once again, we wouldn’t expect anything else here, automation works.

Read on for more insight...

communicatorcorp.com | @CommCorpcommunicatorcorp.com | @CommCorp

Summary

The summary here shows the standard email metrics as an average across 2016.

The average number of emails sent per customer has increased considerably by 1.8m to 6.3m average emails per customer sent in 2016.


What’s changed?When looking at the averages across all sectors, open rate and click rate showed a slight decrease, something that’s echoed across industry benchmark reports too (DMA).

Despite overall open rate decreasing YOY, we saw increases from 8 individual sectors. Motoring, Sports Clubs, Memberships and Financial Services to name a few.

Click to open rate saw the largest decrease YOY, with engagement becoming an issue. Other sectors could take inspiration from those doing this well; Communications, Media and Marketing had the highest increase in CTO with +5.28%.

2015 2016 Diff.

Unique Open Rate 20.76% 20.41% -0.35%

Unique Click Rate 2.68% 2.49% -0.20%

Click to Open Rate 12.71% 12.02% -0.69%

Total Bounce Rate 1.67% 1.31% -0.36%

Hard Bounce Rate 0.18% 0.17% -0.01%

Soft Bounce Rate 1.28% 0.37% -0.91%

Content Bounce Rate 0.22% 0.77% 0.55%

Unsubscribe Rate 0.12% 0.11% 0.00%

Complaint Rate 0.03% 0.01% -0.01%


Automated campaigns use data to tailor a message and can come in the form of triggered campaigns, welcome, purchase confirmation, appointment confirmations or recurring campaigns, birthday, anniversary and re-engagement campaigns to name just a few.

As per our previous benchmark report, we continue to see automated emails outperforming non-recurring emails, as expected.

That being said, only 3 out of 10 of Communicator customers are sending automated campaigns of some kind, meaning some of you are really missing out on using the more sophisticated features of our suite! Feel free to get in touch to talk about how we can help setup your automated email campaigns.

Automated emails


PersonalisationWe’ve classed basic personalisation in the form of addressing a recipient by name in an email subject line or using a personalised from name.

Basic personalisation isn’t performing as well as it did in 2015, where emails with basic personalisation would achieve on average, a higher open rate of 2.69%.

This increase, as a result of using personalisation in 2016, (although was still significant) was only 0.31%; suggesting that basic personalisation isn’t enough to drive opens or engagement with emails. Consumers are expecting the content of that message to be valuable and relevant to them, addressing them by first name in the subject line just isn’t enough to earn that all important click!

email example:

Basic Personalisation

2016

2015

20.01

18.49

Not Personalised

20.32

21.18

Personalised

0.31

2.69

Di�erence %

Unique Opens %


There’s been a 3.57% increase in opens from generic android devices.

Outlook.com saw a 4.74% decrease in opens.

iPhone opens increased by 1.79%, with Apple still leading the way!

Email Device Opens

2.322.22

1.14 0.054...

33.69

16.2911.98

10.46

10.27

5.86

3.91


But it doesn’t stop there…

The best way to measure the success of your email marketing activity is by looking at your own sector, your competitors and by assessing your year-on-year performance.

Would you like to see what your industry benchmark is?

Well, we’ve already done the hard work for you. Our Data Insights Analysts have been busy dissecting our findings by sector too... 17 to be precise!

Included in our full report are the benchmark stats across 17 different sectors, providing you with the detail you need to see what your own industry standard is for the most popular metrics, email personalisation and automation.

To grab your free, tailored copy of the the full report, contact

a member of the team on:

+44 (0) 345 300 2337


Don't miss out


CommunicatorThomson House, Groat Market, Newcastle, NE1 1ED, United Kingdom

E: [email protected]

T: (UK): +44 (0) 844 870 8971

www.communicatorcorp.com

benchmark report 2017 - strategic email marketing provider€¦ · content bounce rate 0.22% 0.77%...

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