A 50% average email open rate and some other email marketing benchmarks – here’s some things that work for me

Here are some quick email marketing benchmarks for my dog category business:

• The email open rate averages 50%;
• The clickthrough rate averages 10%;
• In the last 12 months, about 1/6 of my list has not opened any of my emails.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with my list performance, it’s open rate and engagements.

Some things that help:

1. Don’t send emails very often – one to two times a month for us;
2. Make them especially entertaining – use fun content with lots of images and video;
3. Always send a copy of the email a few days after the first email to those that did not open it – that usually gets me another 5-10% open rates;
4. Try to use headlines that increase response.