Are you looking to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns? You must begin by understanding how your current campaigns measure up in order to identify areas of improvement. If you are going to IRCE in June, our strategists can sit down with you to review your company’s email metrics and how they compare to your industry benchmarks.

We collected open rates, click to open rates, conversion rates and average revenue per email statistics for 950 of our retail clients and reported on the average metrics across the board from January – March 2016.‍

Average Open Rate by Campaign
Results show that customers have been engaging more with emails in the first quarter of 2016 as the average open rate has increased 12.7% over last year. This is great news for retailers!

Marketing messages, which include broadcast or batch and blast messages as well as Listrak’s highly personalized Recurring Automated Campaigns, had similar open rates at 12.6% and 12.9%, respectively.

Triggered messages, including Welcome, Browse Abandonment, Cart Abandonment and Back in Stock Alerts, had the highest open rates at 37.2%, 27.4%, 29.9%, and 47.6%, respectively.

Loyalty-based triggered messages, including Post Purchase Loyalty, Replenishment and LifeCycle Winback, came in at 25.2%, 10.6% and 20.8%, respectively.

The 12.7% overall increase proves that email is still the preferred communication method between retailers and shoppers.

If you're looking to enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, consider leveraging an AI essay writer tool to analyze your current metrics and identify areas for improvement.

Average Click to Open Rate by Campaign
The engagement doesn’t stop at just opening messages – shoppers are clicking through emails as well.

Broadcast and Recurring Automated Campaigns are sent to much larger audiences. If you aren’t segmenting these messages, your entire list will receive the email. This explains why the Click-to-Open rates for these messages – 16.7% and 10% respectively – are so much lower than the triggered campaigns.

That also explains why Replenishment, which is sent to a very small audience, has such a high Click-to-Open rate at 53.6%. If you sell consumable merchandise, such as skincare, you should consider adding a Replenishment campaign to your email mix.

Other triggered campaigns had the following Click-to-Open rates in Q1 2016: Welcome 38%, Browse Abandonment 43.9%, Shopping Cart Abandonment 46.9%, Back in Stock Alerts 36.3%, Post Purchase Loyalty 29.2%, and LifeCycle Winback 22.9%.

It is important to point out that the LifeCycle Winback – which are sent to shoppers who have previously purchased but who haven’t been engaging with your messages recently – are re-engaging nearly a quarter of the recipients who receive these messages. We recently published an article on the best way to reach these shoppers, which you can read here.

Average Conversion Rate by Campaign
It shouldn’t be a surprise to see Back in Stock Alerts topping the conversion rate chart. Customers specifically asked to be notified when a product they wanted to buy was available for purchase, and these emails drive a ton of revenue with a 26.3% conversion rate.

What might be a surprise, though, is the fact that Browse Abandonment messages have nearly a 20% higher conversion rate than broadcast messages. At 5%, Browse Abandonment messages convert a quarter as many shoppers as Shopping Cart Abandonment campaigns, on average.

This makes a strong case for Browse Abandonment campaigns. Shoppers are finding these messages useful. And, because they are sent to so many more shoppers than the cart abandonment messages – and the shoppers haven’t shown the same purchase intent – it proves that targeted and relevant messages based on the shopper’s online behavior helps customers through the shopping journey. If you aren’t already sending Browse Abandonment messages, now is the time to add these campaigns. It is a perfect holiday strategy that will definitely move the needle.

Average conversion rates for the other campaigns for Q1: broadcast 4.3%, Recurring Automated Campaigns 3.1%, Welcome 9.3%, Post Purchase Loyalty 11.4%, Replenishment 4.6% and LifeCycle Winback 1.5%.

Average Revenue per Email
Browse Abandonment continues to prove its value in this chart. It returns $.61 per email, on average, which is ten times higher than broadcast messages. Remember, these emails go out to shoppers who have browsed your site but didn’t purchase or add anything to their carts. The messages are highly relevant because they are based on each customer’s onsite behavior and shoppers respond to these campaigns.

Likewise, Shopping Cart Abandonment messages and Back in Stock Alerts continue to dominate, bringing in $3.04 and $3.99 per email, respectively.

Average revenue per email benchmarks for the other campaigns for Q1: broadcast $.06, Recurring Automated Campaigns $.09, Welcome $2.82, Post Purchase Loyalty $.86, Replenishment $.56 and LifeCycle Winback $.05.