There is no denying that emails are one of the most powerful tools in any marketers’ toolbox, and their ability to quickly and effectively measure the impact of any given campaign, particularly in such a data driven era, makes it a highly valuable channel.
The reality, however, is that while statistics are readily available from you campaigns, it’s hard to know how your campaigns compare to others in a similar industry. Perhaps the most popular question from our clients is, “How many email campaigns should I send in a month?”
Fortunately, HubSpot have released their latest email marketing benchmark data, pulled from over 11,500 customers. Although it will be of no surprise that the best-performing companies send targeted campaigns, rather than blasting to the entire database, many people will be shocked to learn that sending more email campaigns can actually increase the click-through and open rates. In fact the study shows that the best performance is achieved when sending 16 to 30 campaigns per month!
The research found that:
Companies that send 16-30 campaigns a month see a click through rate more than 2X greater than the click rate of companies that send 2 or fewer campaigns a month.
Asking how many email campaigns you should be sending a month, or more specifically how many emails are too many, may once have got you the answer ‘how long’s a piece of string’, but these latest findings suggest that companies sending 16-30 monthly email campaigns will see a CTR 2X greater than that of companies sending 2 or fewer campaigns a month. For the record, that is 16-30 targeted campaigns sent only to a portion of a database, not an email blast to every single person.
Clicks on B2B emails increased as more emails were sent.
While open rates were typically higher for B2C companies, B2B companies did in fact achieve higher click-through rates. It was also found that clicks on B2B emails increased as the frequency of emails sent increased, and companies that sent 16-30 email campaigns had the highest median click rate of 6.0%, compared to B2C companies that only achieved 5.6%.
The exact number of emails sent should be dependent on company size.
Companies with either 1-10 employees or 26-200 employees showed better results when sending the 16-30 emails per month, with the companies of 1-10 employees receiving a median open rate of 35.3% and CTR of 6.9%, and those with 26-200 employees receiving a median open rate of 32.3% and CTR of 6.3%.
Companies with 11-25 employees, however, achieved the highest open rates when sending 31+ email campaigns a month, with a median open rate of 32.4%, however, they surprisingly achieved the most clicks (6.7%) when sending between 16-30 monthly emails.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was that for companies with over 201 employees, the highest median open rate was in fact achieved when sending only 3-5 monthly emails, and the highest click-through was at a frequency of 6-15 emails.
