Recently I've been doing quite a bit of information gathering from our customers and prospects as we start to develop our new user interfaces for email marketing. One feature I've been asked for more than once is the ability to do and see industry and vertical benchmarks for email marketing metrics. On the one hand, I do understand this need to be able to compare the performance of your email marketing campaigns to those of your competitors or peers.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think that email marketing industry benchmarking is a misleading activity that could potentially lead marketers to make false conclusions and/or set unrealistic expectations.

Hear me out (because I know many of you are rolling your eyes or shaking your heads in disbelief). Every marketer’s campaign is a highly tuned series of emails and segments designed to elicit the best reaction from your readers. This means that, even in the same industry or vertical, one marketing program can vastly differ from the other. Doing a benchmark comparison to a generalized industry number is akin to comparing apples to bananas. Benchmarking in itself is not a bad concept. In fact, I think it is an absolutely essential concept in email marketing metrics, but we have to find a way to avoid these apples to bananas comparisons (or accept them for what they are - like we do the open rate).

I’m not suggesting that we do away with marketing benchmarking completely. Instead, what I offer up as a solution is to aim to make more accurate performance comparisons within your own email marketing campaigns. In other words, use your own campaign data as a benchmark from which to continually refine and improve upon the overall effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. What is working for your population? What aspects of your emails are the readers responding to? What factors can you control to increase your users response?

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About The Author

Lindsay Kloepping is a product manager at Lyris. She is responsible for defining and delivering customer requirements to improve their email marketing ROI.

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