Benchmark of Email Open Rates

What should your email open rates be? Depends on who you're marketing to.

Ever wondered what a good number is for your email open rates? A recent study by Silverpop indicates different email open rates based on the target markets of business-to-business and business-to-consumer. These different email types require different creative tactics too.

Silverpop found that B-to-B email recipients were much more likely to answer an all-text email than their B-to-C counterparts. Silverpop's study of 612 emails sent by 430 companies noted that image-rich messages to consumers generated a 7.1% click rate. All-text emails to the same audience only generated a click-through rate of 4.7%.

Business-to-Business emails generated a 5.4% click rate compared to 3.5% for emails containing an equal amount of text and images.

According to Bill Nussey, Silverpop's CEO, "Surprisingly, the location of the offer in B-to-C emails really didn't matter. In the B-to-B world, if that offer wasn't in the top half of the email above the fold, the numbers showed a significant drop in response rates."

Another surprise finding was that in B-to-C emails, with newsletter style layouts, generated a click-through rate of 7.1%, the highest of the seven styles Silverpop monitored. Postcard layouts, a consumer-marketer favorite, generated a 6.2% click-through.

Post-card style business-to-business emails got the highest clickthrough rates (7.9%) compared with other newsletter type emails which pulled 5.4%.

Based on these findings, its clear that b-to-b and b-to-c email marketing campaigns must be treated differently. To get the highest click-through rates, marketers should use newsletter style layouts when reaching out to consumers. When marketing to businesses, a post-card layout is most productive with the offer above the fold.