Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

On July 2009,  eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size.  Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.

About Mailchimp

MailChimp in their own words:

We thought, “Sheesh, people are too busy running their businesses to learn how to code HTML emails. Email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it for them.” We put our pragmatic programming skills to work and built a simple tool that included everything our clients needed and nothing they didn’t. We made it so easy, a human could use it. Our clients loved it. So we made it available to the public. The word kinda spread.

One important caveat is that MailChimp, despite its popularity, it is not one of the biggest players in the e-mail marketing industry as a graph of monthly unique visitors from Compete shows below.

According to Compete, on March 2010, MailChimp had 648,259 unique monthly visitors to its  website while Constant Contact had 6,332,717; iContact, 1,555,720; Bronto, 1,016,602; and Mailer Mailer, 157,437.

As of March 25, 2010, MailChimp scanned over 570 million emails delivered through their system (where campaign tracking was activated, and where users actually reported their industry) and calculated average unique open rates, average unique click rates, average unique soft bounces, average unique hard bounces, and average unique abuse complaint rate by industry.

Here’s what MailChimp found out.

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

This list of e-mail stats is useful to small business owners who do e-mail marketing themselves because 70% of MailChimp customers are 1-10 employees, and they’re design-it-yourselfers. This provides an “apples to apples” comparison with others in your industry.

Type of Company Open Rate Click Rate Soft Bounce Rate Hard Bounce Rate Abuse Complaint Rate Unsubscribe Rate
Agriculture and Food Services 23.94% 4.85% 0.97% 2.06% 0.10% 0.38%
Arts and Artists 17.53% 3.54% 1.58% 2.54% 0.08% 0.25%
Beauty and Personal Care 14.94% 2.65% 0.71% 1.54% 0.09% 0.28%
Business and Finance 15.47% 2.77% 2.10% 1.57% 0.04% 0.21%
Computers and Electronics 15.51% 2.97% 1.12% 1.71% 0.08% 0.30%
Construction 28.70% 8.01% 4.51% 5.81% 0.11% 0.35%
Consulting 16.32% 3.30% 2.50% 2.39% 0.03% 0.25%
Creative Services/Agency 24.64% 3.08% 1.34% 2.05% 0.06% 0.25%
eCommerce 14.98% 3.36% 0.74% 0.88% 0.08% 0.25%
Education and Training 16.64% 3.41% 1.42% 2.09% 0.06% 0.20%
Entertainment and Events 16.09% 2.98% 0.85% 1.55% 0.08% 0.19%
Government 25.66% 5.37% 0.86% 0.89% 0.04% 0.20%
Health and Fitness 20.96% 5.73% 3.14% 6.30% 0.06% 0.30%
Hobbies 18.45% 4.33% 1.13% 2.08% 0.12% 0.40%
Home and Garden 28.20% 4.38% 2.93% 2.68% 0.02% 0.41%
Insurance 20.91% 3.03% 2.37% 4.15% 0.10% 0.30%
Legal 17.34% 2.49% 0.79% 0.89% 0.02% 0.12%
Marketing and Advertising 18.79% 4.13% 1.39% 2.50% 0.08% 0.23%
Media and Publishing 18.43% 3.39% 0.48% 0.63% 0.03% 0.11%
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare 13.76% 2.59% 2.18% 4.09% 0.06% 0.18%
Music and Musicians 13.95% 2.43% 0.68% 1.07% 0.06% 0.18%
Non-Profit 20.43% 3.54% 1.13% 1.51% 0.05% 0.17%
Other 33.52% 10.90% 0.83% 1.66% 0.09% 0.40%
Photo and Video 28.93% 5.70% 0.99% 1.34% 0.07% 0.26%
Politics 13.72% 2.58% 0.49% 0.78% 0.07% 0.15%
Professional Services 19.77% 3.71% 2.55% 3.57% 0.08% 0.45%
Public Relations 14.81% 1.12% 2.07% 2.28% 0.03% 0.16%
Real Estate 18.48% 3.44% 1.18% 1.67% 0.06% 0.25%
Recruitment and Staffing 15.31% 3.35% 1.37% 1.75% 0.07% 0.31%
Religion 23.04% 3.24% 0.52% 0.68% 0.05% 0.15%
Restaurant 20.07% 2.41% 0.70% 1.11% 0.09% 0.30%
Retail 17.80% 3.54% 0.61% 1.00% 0.08% 0.24%
Social Networks and Online Communities 22.37% 2.85% 6.94% 5.44% 0.11% 0.74%
Software and Web App 15.57% 2.49% 1.88% 3.06% 0.11% 0.39%
Sports 19.54% 4.77% 0.86% 1.53% 0.08% 0.24%
Telecommunications 21.20% 3.22% 1.60% 2.85% 0.10% 0.41%
Travel and Transportation 14.50% 2.71% 0.84% 0.83% 0.05% 0.17%

Use these stats to evaluate your past, current and future e-mail marketing campaigns.

Thank you for your time!

Author: Damian Davila

Ideas and concepts from Damian Davila, Ecuatoriano thriving in Hawaii. Pro marketer and blogger. Find him at @idaconcpts on Twitter.

3 thoughts on “Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry”

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