Introducing Bluecore’s 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report

Email is the most powerful channel for any digital retail marketer. 

Over the past several years, critical innovations have come to email that combined the channel’s core tenet as a direct connection between retailers and customers with modern marketing goals around intelligent personalization.

This type of personalization can lead to incredible improvements in performance, but it can also make understanding that performance more difficult. Let’s explore exactly what that means.

Email Matters, A Lot…

Time and again, email has confirmed its ability to help retailers that are focused on a digitally dominant strategy double down on highly personalized, people-based marketing efforts — all while maintaining stringent new privacy standards. Email has also emerged as the most valuable channel to achieve these goals due to its abilities to:

• Grow engagement and revenue by providing retail marketers with direct access to customers 
• Act as the most addressable identifier for marketers in the digital world

Not only has email proven itself as an effective channel for building loyalty and driving both first and repeat purchases, but it also offers a highly efficient way to achieve key retail goals. Specifically, it delivers a higher return on investment than paid media channels, where changing ad algorithms continue to reduce the efficacy of acquisition-focused marketing spend. The most modern email solutions also offer improved, automated workflows for developing highly personalized multi-touch campaigns.

All of these benefits came to a head in early 2020 and positioned the most forward-thinking retailers to remain agile as the COVID-19 pandemic forced a near overnight shift to eCommerce.

…So Does Monitoring Email Program Health

Of course realizing the benefits of a modern eCommerce email marketing program requires regularly evaluating program health to determine what’s working and what’s not and to identify areas for continued growth.

The best areas to evaluate email program health are engagement metrics like open, click, conversion and unsubscribe rates as well as revenue metrics like revenue per email and revenue per click.

But if your marketing team sends an email that results in a 30% open rate and 9% click rate, what does that actually mean for your email program? Is that good? Bad? Average?

In isolation, email engagement metrics like open, clicks and conversions mean nothing. To truly understand the value of any given campaign and the health of your overall email program and to plan effective strategies going forward, you need benchmarks.

These benchmarks will fall into one of two categories:

• Self Comparison: Compare metrics from your own email program over time to track trends and understand how different activities impact performance. This type of benchmark allows you to measure internal success and program growth over time.
• Industry Comparison: Compare metrics from your email program to those from other email programs like yours. This type of benchmark allows you to put your program performance into perspective based on external factors.

Personalization Adds Complexity to Measuring Email Program Health

The personalization imperative facing eCommerce email marketing programs complicates this type of measurement. The more personalized emails get, the more complex the overall email marketing program becomes.

Self comparison benchmarks remain relatively clear and continue to underscore the value of highly personalized marketing. But as brands increase personalization based on this self comparison, industry comparison benchmarks become more difficult. That’s because you can no longer just compare the average open rate for your entire email program to a standard benchmark for your industry.

Instead, you need benchmarks that are as personalized as your email program. That means benchmarks for all different types of emails, audiences, levels of personalization and more.

That’s where Bluecore’s 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report comes in.

Bluecore’s 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report is Designed with Personalization in Mind

The purpose of Bluecore’s 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report is to provide benchmarks that reflect all the nuances of modern, highly personalized eCommerce email marketing programs. It explores the extent to which retailers have embraced email for different types of communications, the level of personalization used across email and the effectiveness of those messages. 

To deliver on that promise, we analyzed performance data from more than 9.5 billion emails sent by a subset of Bluecore’s global eCommerce brands from March 2019 through February 2020. (Note: We specifically chose this timeframe to avoid any unusual activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic skewing the data, as this report is meant to offer a long-term benchmark against which retail marketers can measure their performance.)

Dive Into the Data: Bluecore’s 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report

Ready to review top email personalization trends and see how your email program benchmarks compare to Bluecore’s retail industry benchmarks? Click here to download the full 2020 Retail Email Benchmark Report.