In this post, I will round up some essential email marketing statistics from a few influential articles dated 2020 (e.g. Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc.) and couple them with data coming from my B2B tech sales activity as a comparison.
(1) Acquisition VS Retention
I've used Email Marketing campaigns with two different strategies:
Acquisition the process starts by building a prospects database (e.g. email, names, roles, etc.), after the definition of my "Ideal Customer Profile". This search is mainly based on Linkedin. Database construction is a simple activity if you already have all the premium tools. Getting in touch via LinkedIn before sending anything via email can sensibly influence the success of your campaign.
Retention This strategy starts with an already existing database of prospects. They might be previous customers or prospects that didn't convert into clients for several reasons (e.g. bad timing). Email marketing is just another strategy to keep the connection open
Both these strategies end up getting in touch with the group of most active prospects.
My statistics related to both the strategies: Acquisition Retention
Open rate (OR) 30-40 % 60-70 %
Click to Open rate (CTOR) 3-5 % 5-10 %
Note the different results between these two strategies.
(2) Open Rate (OR) and Click to Open rate (CTOR)
The Open Rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered campaigns were opened by subscribers. To find this out, Mailchimp loads a tiny, transparent image into each campaign, and counts how often the image is loaded among the delivered campaigns.
The Click to Open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered and opened campaigns registered at least one click.
Mailchimp provides also a per-sector statistics, allowing results comparison -> Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry
Here reported some of these stats divided per industry
OR (%) CTOR (%)
My campaign (Acquisition) 37,6 4 My campaign (Retention) 68,6 6,3
Consulting 20,1 12,3
E-Learning 23,4 12,4
Medical 21,7 11,4
Software and IT firms 21,2 11,5
Business & FinTech 21,6 12,6
Computers & Electronics 19,3 10,7
Note: I don't need to redirect my public towards my website, as my business is not in the "e-commerce" shape. My articles are meant to share insights about B2B tech sales and keep me connected with my audience, so I keep my focus on the Open Rate factor.
(3) Return on Investment
According to the UK Data & Marketing Association (DMA), for every £1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of £42 (DMA, 2019). Moreover, this trend is improving over time (note the graph below):
How much is the ROI for every pound spent on email marketing? (DMA, 2019)
(4) Email Marketing helps to grow your business
Email continues to be the main driver of customer retention and acquisition for small and midsize businesses. According to the data, 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (Emarsys, 2018).
Which online activities primarily drive customer acquisition & retention for your organization? (Source: Emarsys)
There might be a lot of talk about social media, likes, shares, and tweets, but that doesn’t mean that email marketing is becoming less valuable. Email marketing tops the chart in comparison to organic search, paid search, and social media when it comes to customers’ acquisition & retention.
(5) Other A/B testing statistics
A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing assets and measuring the difference in performance. You do this giving one version to one group and the other version to another group
Some interesting A/B testing results by GetResponse, 2019
Words in Email Subject line
OR (%) CTOR (%)
fw 33,2 11,7
pdf 24,5 30,3
Newsletter 24,1 31,4
Infographic 12,9 35,1
re: 15,7 15,6
quick 17,5 13,9
Has graphics?
OR (%) CTOR (%)
YES 24,6 15,2
NO 16,3 16,8
Geography
OR (%) CTOR (%)
North America 19,0 15,7
Europe 26,8 16,2
Asia 18,5 13,7
Germany 40,7 17,2
France 36,3 14,4
UK 18,4 14,5
USA 18,4 15,1
About Holborn Consulting
Holborn is a Sales advisory boutique in London, specialised in supporting high-tech firms in the B2B market development.