Industry KPIs: Email open rates climb dramatically as signal loss draws near

The news: Email open rates have increased significantly across advertising sectors over the last few years, per our Industry KPIs data provided by Klaviyo.

• Email open rates have climbed dramatically since 2020 and hovered around 40% for all tracked advertising sectors in Q4 2023. Home and garden had the highest OR with 41.6%, followed by sporting goods and apparel and accessories (41.3%), food and beverage (40.9%), specialty goods (40.6%), toys and hobbies (40.5%), and jewelry (40.2%).
• Automotive, electronics, hardware and home improvement, health and beauty, mass merchant, and office supplies were all just below 40%.

Why this matters: Addressability in digital advertising is likely to decline in the near future with the end of third-party cookies and major regulatory crackdowns on data gathering and targeting practices. As delivering ads becomes more difficult, marketing channels that consumers can opt into are a powerful tool for advertisers to leverage.

• Though the end of third-party cookies on Chrome was delayed yet again, the change is inevitable, and advertisers should start preparing for signal loss now by swapping to first-party data and more personal channels like email. Regulatory changes in Europe have also restricted targeting, and similar measures have been floated in the US.
• Even before the current signal loss trend, email marketing was emerging as a valuable medium. In an October 2023 Ascend2 survey, 50% of B2B marketers said email marketing was their most effective channel.
• Sixty-two percent of US B2B and B2C marketers increased their email marketing budgets in 2022 and 2023, per SeQuel Response.

Our take: Email marketing is a valuable tool that advertisers across sectors should harness to strike stronger connections with consumers and make up for upcoming signal loss.

• But even email marketing isn’t without its challenges: Google has introduced rules for bulk email distribution that cut back on overaggressive senders. While responsible marketers shouldn’t be affected by the change, the new rules show that email, too, is under scrutiny as a marketing channel.

Go deeper: Interested in seeing more email benchmarks? Industry KPI subscribers can get right to benchmarking performance against over 400+ industry benchmarks; see more here.