Email marketing is constantly evolving. Your marketing does too, though, and it also reveals different ways in which you can improve your email marketing strategy one change at a time -- and identifies the true best practices.
Here’s a look at four common email marketing pain points and the current data you need to make educated decisions about your campaigns.
Email deliverability concerns almost every B2B marketer, since many B2B marketers use email to distribute their thought leadership content. When you’re paying for each email you send, maximizing the percentage of people who actually receive the email in their inbox is important. There are two main reasons that emails can fail to deliver: hard bounces from inactive inboxes and soft bounces from active but delayed inboxes.
Current mailbox-provider rules make that discipline more important than ever. Google’s bulk sender guidelines say senders should keep spam rates below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching 0.30% or higher, and Google and Yahoo now require stronger authentication and easy unsubscribe support for high-volume senders. That’s a meaningful deliverability benchmark your team can manage against, not just a technical footnote.
Proactively pruning and sanitizing your email list doesn’t have to be an intimidating all-day event: your email vendor should automatically remove "hard bounces" and identify the "soft bounces" that happen over and over again. A healthy email program also gives people a clear way to unsubscribe, because a smaller, engaged list is worth more than a large list that trains inbox providers to distrust your messages.
Not only will this improve your deliverability rate and save you money, but it may also save your company's email reputation. Continuing to send bulk email to non-responsive or invalid email addresses increases the likelihood that spam filters will mark your campaign as spam, further damaging your email inbox placement rates.
Another question we hear a lot is, “How much is too much email?” And the answer may surprise you.
You may be able to increase your frequency to drive purchases, demos, event registrations, or sales conversations, but engagement is not independent of frequency. As you send more, engagement per campaign can go down. Sooner or later, there is a frequency sweet spot you need to hit.
You can raise email frequency when there is a clear reason and a hard end-date: a product launch, a webinar sequence, a limited enrollment period, or a trade show follow-up campaign. But as a general rule, you’ll want to aim for engagement, not frequency.
Mailchimp’s current benchmark data is a useful reminder to watch the quality signals, not only the send count. Across all listed industries, Mailchimp reports a 0.22% average unsubscribe rate, while the business and finance category reports a 0.15% average unsubscribe rate. If your unsubscribe rate, spam complaints, or click engagement moves the wrong way as frequency rises, the list is telling you something.
In most B2B industries, prospects have an unlimited number of questions. They may benefit from a lot of content, while simple, less-considered purchases don't require frequency. The only way to find out the perfect frequency for your prospects is to test with your target audience in mind.
For a B2B marketing team, email should connect to the rest of the buying journey. If you are using email to move prospects from helpful content to a sales conversation, make sure the cadence, offer, and follow-up path fit your content marketing strategy instead of treating every contact the same.
The best time of day to send an email depends on your target audience's work cadence.
You’ll want to keep in mind different aspects of the clients you’re emailing, such as location (are they in the United States, or global?) and time zone (East Coast? West Coast? Brazil?). To truly optimize the timing of your email, you may need to further segment your email marketing lists to account for these location-based criteria.
Benchmarks can give you a starting point, but they should not be a rule. A weekly update to customers, a webinar reminder, a sales-nurture email, and a re-engagement campaign may all perform differently because the audience and intent are different.
Use your email platform to test time-of-day and day-of-week patterns against the actions you actually care about: clicks, replies, form submissions, booked meetings, or qualified pipeline. Open rate can still help you spot obvious delivery or subject-line problems, but privacy changes and image preloading make opens less reliable as a standalone measure of interest.
By now you know that a huge email list isn’t the most important thing -- it’s an engaged email list that will take your business to the next level. But you still need a benchmark so you can tell whether your campaigns are earning attention.
Mailchimp’s current email marketing benchmarks report an average open rate of 35.63% across all listed industries and 31.35% for business and finance campaigns. The same benchmark page reports an average click rate of 2.62% across all listed industries and 2.78% for business and finance. Use those numbers as directional context, not a guarantee; your audience, offer, list quality, and campaign type matter more than a universal average.
Open rate comes down to the "from" name, the subject line, inbox placement, and whether your audience has learned to expect useful email from you. For B2B marketers, the more useful question is not “How do we improve open rate?” It is “How do we earn enough trust that the right people open, click, reply, and take the next step?”
Pro tips: Use a real person's name in your campaign's "from" name, and write a short, impactful subject line that exudes helpfulness. Give them something they can use. Then measure the click, reply, form-fill, or sales action that tells you the message actually helped the business.