2014 email marketing performance barometer by sector

As every year, Experian Marketing Services publishes its email marketing performance barometer. The study is based on more than 17 billion loyalty emails sent via Experian's platforms in 2014.

The main conclusion of this edition is the increase in opening rates in France, we go from 38.49% of cumulative openings in 2013 to 41.19% in 2014.

Note: discover the 2015 version of the barometer by clicking here.

Here are some notes on the results:

Deliverability

The average bounce rate (NPAI) in 2014 was 4.90%, a figure down from last year, but still high when you consider that these are just loyalty campaigns.

The two sectors that stand out the most in this respect are luxury (3.11%) and fashion (3.15%). The worst performers are public procurement (11.95%) and B2B (7.94%).

Openers

The average (unique) opener rate is 22.36% in 2014. The disparity between the different sectors is significant, as there is nearly a 10-point difference between the best and worst performers. In the top of the ranking, we find the banking and insurance sector with 29.65% and luxury with 28.74%. At the bottom of the basket we find the pure players and the VAD with 18.88%.

Clickers

The average number of unique clickers in 2014 was 3.38%. The best sectors are tourism and leisure with 4.38% and again the banking and insurance sector with 4.02%. Interestingly, the press sector is the worst performer with 2.77% of clicks while it is above average in terms of opener rate.

Reactivity

The average reactivity rate is 15.01%. Here again, there are large differences between the different sectors. We even double from the first one (Banking/insurance with 19.81%) to the last one (B2B with 10.85%).

Unsubscribe

First of all, let's remember that the unsubscribe rate is a difficult value to judge. A low unsubscribe rate can both mean that the emails are well accepted by the target or, on the contrary, that the emails are delivered to the spam box and the recipients do not see them. The average rate in 2014 was 0.17%.

Other comments

Two sectors particularly attract my attention, on the one hand the banking and insurance sectors, which are systematically ranked among the good students. This indicates that despite the risks linked to the use of email marketing in the sector, the customers of financial institutions attach great importance to the messages conveyed and do not hesitate to update their data in order not to miss important information.

On the other hand, fashion and pure players/ADV are the sectors in which the number of campaigns is the highest, 7.4/week for fashion and 6.9/week for pure players/ADV while the average is 3.9. Unfortunately, this translates into below-average opening rates.

Summary of email marketing performance by sector