How to Set Benchmarks for Email KPIs Based on Audience Behavior

The ideal method for assessing email success involves setting proper and relevant standards through email KPIs. There is certainly benchmark data available across nearly every industry and it's good to examine that data but aligning it with the actions of your audience brings a more precise understanding of success. The better you understand how your subscribers prefer to engage with your brand (and your emails), the better you'll be able to create relevant, attainable goals. This article teaches you how to set standards for your email KPIs based on audience activity.

Audience-Focused Benchmarks Make More Sense

Benchmarks based on your audience provide accurate context relative to email performance. Contentful competitors often emphasize the importance of using audience-specific analytics tools to refine these benchmarks and tailor content strategies to real subscriber behavior. While industry averages may be comparative, they don't necessarily apply to the precise needs of your subscriber base. Audience-focused benchmarks based on performance give you broader insights into how your subscribers might behave differently than the average person at a competing firm whether they're responding to more aggressive marketing tactics or purposefully avoiding engagement with such brands. Thus, an audience KPI relative to performance metrics is more likely to make an email campaign successful.

Benchmarking Against Prior Campaigns

Your prior email campaigns are an excellent way to set benchmarks from within. Instead of importing industry standards or assessing current open rates, look at click-through rates and conversion rates relative to your average unsubscribe rate and the benchmarks against the competition. This will show you previously established trends and patterns. If certain campaigns saw significantly higher open rates or click-through rates, those can be used to establish benchmarks for what worked, helping to determine what can be potentially used in the future. Campaigns will be assessed against a previously established baseline of amounts and patterns.

Better Segmentation Equals Better Benchmarks

The more segmented your audience is, the more effective benchmarks will be and the more accurate they'll be. This is because different audience segments operate on different preferences, trends, and patterns. Even a loyal subscriber base may have groups that have gone unrecognized due to miscommunication of interest (i.e., engagement history). Segmentation of those interested and not interested creates a clearer picture of the accuracy of each performance benchmark over time.

KPI Benchmark Rationalization Based on Subscriber Behavior

Learning when a subscriber opens an email, whether they finish reading it, and if they click out of a product page all adds insight to goal orientation. Benchmarking from these actions also helps you determine which KPIs are most necessary for your campaigns. For example, if people consistently click in the middle of the week between 1 and 3 PM, your send-time optimization benchmark goals are apparent. Using behavior as motivation for how realistic or unrealistic your KPI goals are makes for significant changes in your email marketing endeavors.

KPI Benchmarking Relative to Subscriber Lifecycle Stages

Subscriber lifecycle stages from new subscribers to onboarding, nurturing, retaining, and even reactivating greatly affect all associated KPIs and their benchmarks. Average adjustments in behavior are justifiable for specific KPI goal attainments per lifecycle stage. For example, newer subscribers may be interested in open rate engagement but not interested in converting; older subscribers may stabilize yet anticipate increased results from midway through their lifecycle onward. Benchmarking relative to these lifecycles means accurate measurement and actionable adjustments in email marketing strategies.

Benchmark Goals Mean More When Informed by Engagement Data

When determining benchmarks, having engagement data as a critical component helps you be more accurate. Whether it's learning what people clicked on, who responded to emails, or what action items occur after someone makes a purchase matters. If people like a certain graphic, color palette, or copy approach, then it's proven; there is subscriber engagement that benchmark creators can use to create a meaningful benchmark for future goals. By continually relying on engagement data, your KPI goals can remain accurate based on subscriber preferences and actions, making your email marketing efforts much more effective.

Review and Adjust Benchmarks Over Time

Setting email benchmarks based on your audience's behaviors is not a static process. It's important to review and adjust over time. Audiences shift based on the market, subscriber burnout, shifting interests, etc. The more you test, analyze, and review your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) benchmarks, the more validity they have in the first place. With a dynamic approach to how benchmarks should change over time, you'll always be in the position to create the best email performance based on adjusted benchmarks that reflect real-time information and a meaningful email campaign that's aligned with shifting audience interests.

Occasionally Incorporating the Industry Benchmark for Additional Flavor

While setting the benchmark from your specific audience is expected and best practice it's useful to occasionally incorporate the industry benchmark to add flavor to the story behind your analytics. There are times when comparing your audience-based KPIs to the industry average can help identify opportunities for further development and growth based on an outsider's point of view. When using such comparisons as validation to defend or refute stability, just be sure that you're not selling your capabilities short or overestimating something by only relying on the statistics from the industry average. Use the audience-based benchmarks to construct your strategy and implement the industry average for comparative good use, but never to discount your audience's viability.

Realistic/Aspirational Goals for Benchmark Base Comparison

There's always a sense of realistic and aspirational goals when it comes to benchmarking. Keeping the benchmarks grounded in what has been experienced by the audience provides for a realistic goal, while stretching those numbers every once in a while provides for aspirational growth and strategic potential. Finding that happy medium between realistic and aspirational is encouraging to your marketing team, who can understand what's feasible based on prior work and what's possible for further achievement and growth. Assess what's most meaningful to you to retain appropriate benchmarks and to make KPIs realistic, encouraging, and ultimately having meaning in performance growth.

Benchmarking with Behavioral Insights for Personalization

Personalization becomes even more effective through behavioral benchmarks leading to increased subscriber satisfaction and loyalty. When marketers know what's average for a subscriber how they engage within specific thresholds and how often and in what ways they have a better starting point from which to recalibrate future communications. They also help assess how people should be best personalized, what the email should be about, when it should be sent, and what types of offers it should include essentially, everyone gets what they desire (and need). Personalization using such metrics not only increases generalized satisfaction for each individual subscriber, but also increases loyalty because subscribers enjoy being catered to and want to continue receiving correspondence. Thus, this improves overall email campaign results.

Benchmarking Communication Inside Marketing Teams

Communicating KPI benchmarks with your marketing team keeps campaigns consistent and communicates success or failure. When the entire team is on the same page about expectations for the audience, necessary adjustments can be made on the fly. Internally aligned benchmarks with the marketing team ensure that all emails go out for the same desired result. The opportunity to share benchmarks, especially those that are behavioral what has and has not worked in the past is transparent and accountable; when team members understand how other campaigns have fared, they're more critically invested in their efforts. Thus, established benchmarks promote better management of any campaign efforts when communicated throughout the team.

Benchmark Feedback From Subscriber Retention Rates

A strong means of feedback regarding your benchmarks comes from measuring subscriber retention. When you measure it along with other KPIs, you can tell whether or not your benchmarks accurately reflect where you need to go. Retention rates are a great indicator of how well you've been treating your subscribers; if people are sticking around, it's a good bet your benchmarks are accurate, but if people are dropping like flies, it's a good indication that your benchmarking is off and you should assess from there. Retention rates can come into play to change and adjust benchmarks as long as you're keeping track of how well (or poorly) your subscribers react in the long run. This is an effective way to make sure the levels of tolerance, satisfaction, changing needs, and ultimate preferences aren't ever disregarded.

Qualitative Feedback to Calculate Averages Against Your Audience

When you calculate averages from qualitative feedback from subscribers such as surveys, comments, and reviews, it fine-tunes the efficacy of email averages. While quantitative averages show trends and averages, qualitative feedback shows what's motivating subscriber behavior. Calculating what subscribers experience, want, dislike, etc., clarifies their perspective and marketers' benchmarks which work in favor of true audience perception. Constantly blending qualitative results keeps averages relevant, effective, and percentage over time.

Campaign-Type Averages as Benchmarks

Since campaign types are different promotional vs educational vs transactional vs newsletters it's reasonable to assume that audience response behaviors are different too. Therefore, average benchmarks specific for types as opposed to a universal average will be more statistically proven and effective. Knowing what subscribers are doing relative to what's expected helps formulate better precision and accuracy relative to average per segmented benchmarks. Customizing time based upon KPI-specific activity allows marketers to better adjust strategy and messaging for increased performance.

Average Relative to Subscriber Expectations

Subscriber expectations influence how and why they act. Therefore, consistently assessing how different types of email campaigns perform against expected value and what should be done based upon minimum requirements is essential in managing changes over time. If there are gaps between what is sent and what subscribers want, calculate this deviation from average and adjust your benchmarks accordingly. Keeping your benchmarks in line with what subscribers expect keeps email campaigns relevant more regularly, maintains interest and loyalty, and fosters consistent engagement.

Conclusion: The Value of Behavior-Based Benchmarking

Email KPI benchmarks based on audience expectations and behaviors mean relevant, accurate, and meaningful measures of success because they eliminate guesswork. Where blind industry benchmarks create one-size-fits-all expectations that don't account for unique patterns and preferences from a loyal subscriber audience, measured benchmarks based on what's been seen provide the necessary insights to realize what's working or not.

Those who control the email process are in a better position to know what compels their audience. They can explain open rate differences based on subject lines sent and subscriber age and interest versus just an industry average that doesn't take anything into account.

Marketers receive this information by relying on precise segmentation, assessing newsletters based on the subscriber lifecycle, and measuring engagement statistics and A/B testing. Each component reinforces dynamic, ever-changing benchmarks as audiences change over time and what works today may not necessarily work down the line. For example, segmentation allows for specific KPIs for specific groups; even if two groups seem to find a certain email appealing, group one opened the email 50% of the time and clicked through to the website 40% of the time while group two only opened the email 25% of the time. Group one deserves stricter adherence to KPI benchmarks; it's visible they're more engaged at that point.

Therefore, with an established A/B testing plan post-campaign implementation and feedback loops with audiences down the line, something as universal and basic as a quarterly holiday campaign may not always mean the same thing year after year. What works this quarter may not work next year (or even next quarter) if audience demographics change; thus, keeping benchmarks fresh keeps them relevant, actionable, and aware.

Ultimately, applying all of this means more personal engagement with subscribers after the fact so campaigns can be reinvigorated for the future. Personalization provides subscribers more value in what they're actually receiving; they're more likely to have better impressions of the brand and their future loyalty enhanced by what they've come to believe is effective through proper measurements justified. At the same time, these measurements ensure brands cater improvements to what their subscribers desire versus generalized avenues that will have little to no impact on success.

Thus, when email KPI benchmarks based on audience expectations derived from seen behaviors occur, email campaigns are that much more effective and intentional based on improvement strategies that exist before execution, thanks to past success with that particular subscriber base.

Sustainable marketing success is possible when email KPI benchmarks fulfill expectations based solely on what has been seen from subscriber behavior because it offers a tangible foundation from which to change decisions going forward.

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