Email is a multi-faceted tool.

Many of our clients utilize email to engage customers across levels of intent. Above, we took the data and segmented it by campaign type.

The lowest converting campaign type is browse abandonment. These emails convert at a 4.10%. However, when you consider the nature of these emails, it is a significant improvement over not having any type of engagement at all. 

Once customers demonstrate higher purchase intent, emails convert at a substantially higher rate. 

The most effective triggered email type by conversion rate is "Email My Cart". It triggers after a customer has added an item to their cart and then attempts to abandon the session. 

Email conversion rate is one of the best "macro" KPIs that you can select.

While some prefer to focus on overall profitability or ROI, the truth is not all of your customers are going to be big spenders. 

With proper segmentation, you can (and should be) optimizing for both overall revenue and ROI. The problem is that in isolation, your conversion rate is not very prescriptive. How to increase your conversion rate is impossible to tell from this metric alone.

This is why it is imperative that we look to the "micro-conversions" leading up to purchase. 

Email marketing has always been a high ROI channel for eCommerce. This section will break down the highest revenue generating email types.

By far, the most effective triggered email campaign is Email My Cart. 

On a per email basis, Email My Cart campaigns generated 54.9% more revenue per email than the second highest converting campaign type (cart abandonment emails), and 168% better than the average. 

Back to stock and post-purchase emails proved to be much less effective than the other campaign types.

Unfortunately, many companies do not employ the highest converting email types. In fact, Email My Cart represent less than 1% of total sent emails in our database. 

This is a massive opportunity for many eCommerce stores. 

Unlike other email KPIs, ROI is more nueanced. 

Many eCommerce companies fail to properly account for all of the costs assoicated with gaining a customer.  Simple things such as shipping and fulfillment costs, returns, customer service, and more. 

I recommend taking a look at our guide on Return on Marketing Investment - ROMI. It goes in detail on how to account for all costs associated with landing your next customer. 

There, we lay out a simple formula to caclulate true ROI, which can easily be modified to fit email marketing. 

ROI = Profit Attributed to Email Marketing / Cost of Email Marketing.

The power in ROI calculations is in using it to improve your email campaign performance.

To improve you ROI, consider testing

While our database is heavy on automated triggered emails, the Data & Marketing Association has identified a number of other key email marketing ROI statistics. 

Email open rate is a base metric provided by every major email service provider.

It is a great "top of the funnel" metric for eCommerce email marketing campaigns.  

As we will see, open rates vary dramatically across campaign types.

Because different email types have vastly different expected open rates, average email open rate statistics are relatively useless. 

Note: the same applies to all other email statistics: CR, CTR, CTOR, AOV, etc. When able, look to compare similar campaign stats.

Further, using open rate as your main KPI doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you focused on only maximizing open rate, you would only send to those customers most likely to engage with your messaging (for example, your “best” and “loyal” customer segments in an rfm analysis).

That being said, open rate is a very valuable metric to gauge the effectiveness of your subject line, relationship with your audience, and quality of your offer.

Open rates are one of the easiest metrics to track.

Email open rates are calculated by taking the total number of opened emails and dividing it by the total number of sent emails.

As mentioned, most ESP providers will be able to provide this data for you at both an aggregated and per campaign level in their dashboard. 

Our study compared email open rates from 2016-2022. 

Unlike conversion rates, which saw an overall low in 2022, email open rates hit their highest mark ever at an incredible 48.69%!

There is a huge variance in open rates across the most popular campaign types. 

"Back in Stock" emails had the highest open rate (65.32%), performing almost 70% better than the lowest performing email campaign type of post-purchase emails.

Like conversion rates, "email my cart" triggered emails performed extremely well, and markedly better than the lower intent browse abandonment email.

Shopping cart abandonment emails were opened 44.76% of the time, in line with previous shopping cart abandonment email statistics.

The single most immediate way to improve your email open rate is to improve your subject line.

We’ve covered the best types of cart abandonment email subject lines here.  

After you improve your subject line, you can focus on building relationships with your user base through regular, valuable communication. Look at your own inbox. Which emails do you read religiously and which do you auto-delete?

It is interesting to note that open rates from our database are significantly higher than other more general platforms.

For example, in Mailchimp's latest Email Marketing Benchmark Report, they broke out a variety of email open rates by industry. 

Why is this?

First, and most importantly, many of Barilliance's triggered email campaigns are set off when customers express interest in a product. This allows eCommerce stores to send highly relevant emails at the exact time of consideration.

Second, many of our clients utilize personalization in their subject lines, injecting product names that customers either added to their cart or simply spent the most time on.

The lesson is to maximize engagement by capturing contact information and automating personal, relevant messages to continue the education and motivation process. 

Like open rates, email click through rate (CTR) is a basic metric that is easily assessable through most professional email providers.

It is a fantastic metric to evaluate your emails message and offer. 

The standard definition of email click through rate (CTR) is to take the total number of visitors who clicked through on the email (usually a link within the email to a website page) divided by the total number of sent emails.

However, recently another form of CTR is gaining popularity.

Instead of using the total number of sent emails as the base, it uses the total number of opened emails.

This "new" click through rate is called click to open rate, or CTOR.

CTOR is a narrower metric which focuses on the quality of the email body, and controls for outside variables such as subject line and delivery.

As with conversion rate and open rates, 2017 slightly outperformed 2016 across both CTOR and CTR.

It is interesting to compare these numbers to industry averages. Constant Contact has a great Industry Comparison Chart that breaks down both open and click through rates on a wide range of industries. 

These numbers are dramatically higher than industry studies compiled by Mailchimp.

Regardless of which industry benchmarks you use, there is a substantial difference between our database numbers and these figures.

Our database shows a 15.4% increase over Constant Contact's industry average and 275% increase over Mailchimps.

Like open rates, this difference can be attributed to the high percentage of triggered emails in our database, segmentation best practices, and personalization techniques embedded within the email.

By far the highest converting email type was "email my cart" campaigns.

39.42% of email recipients ultimately clicked through on these emails, 101% more often than the second highest campaign type (cart abandonment - 19.6%).

Outside of "email my cart" campaigns, the other campaign types were close to each other. 

The lowest click through rates came from post purchase and browser abandonment emails.

Your email click through rate depends entirely on how well your offer is crafted for each individual recipient.

One key to success is to leverage personalization throughout your email copy and ultimate offer. A study published by Aberdeen shows that personalization increases CTR by 14%.

One of our clients increased their CTR by 26.96% by A/B testing product injection in the subject line (full case study here)

Other email marketing datasets exist, with some fantastic conclusions of their own. 

Below is a short list of other email statistics. 

Klaviyo recently released their 2022 email benchmark report. In it, they compare over 100k different businesses, and how they have performed in their email marketing. 

It is a fantastic resource, and I strongly encourage anyone interested in email marketing statistics to check it out in full (the full version includes industry specific metrics which you can better compare your own metrics with).

Here we quote their summary metrics and provide some analysis. 

I was surprised to see how closely many of the flow types performed on Klaviyo. In our analysis, we saw clear divergences in engagement based on the flow type, with back to stock type of campaigns coming in as high as 65% open rates and post purchase emails as low as 39%. 

We do see cart abandonment flows outperform in both datasets. Klaviyo shows how cart abandonment generates the highest clickthrough and conversion rates among email flow types. 

This aligns well with Barilliance email marketing data, which saw cart abandonment campaigns consistently perform well, second only to email my cart campaigns (not broken out in Klaviyo study). 

Use these email marketing statistics to benchmark your own ROI and conversion metrics.

Then, make sure you are implementing the most effective email types:

We wrote a short book illustrating all of these tactics and more titled "19 Tactics to Increase Email Subscribers".  You can download it for free here.

Lastly, to learn how Barilliance empowers eCommerce and retail brands execute these strategies (and more), request a demo here.