MailChimp Publishes Small-Business Benchmarks

E-mail service provider MailChimp has cobbled together a fairly comprehensive table of metric benchmarks for small businesses.

“There are a lot of benchmark studies out there but most of them are for large businesses,” said Ben Chestnut, co-founder of MailChimp. “I think small businesses trend a little lower than most of the big companies. They may have stale lists, some are just getting started and aren’t mailing as frequently.”

According to a study of the company’s more than 20,000 customers in 51 industry categories, small businesses achieved an average open rate of 26%—defined as the percentage of e-mails sent where the receiving machine called for graphics from the sender.

More importantly, the study determined that MailChimp’s customers achieved an average click rate of slightly higher than 4%.

However, the numbers vary significantly from industry to industry.

“The numbers are basically all over the board,” said Chestnut.

For example, IT hardware providers achieved an astounding 62.28% open rate, according to MailChimp. But their click rates are a comparatively low 1.01%.

“I’m wondering if it’s just geeks who want to read information, but don’t want to do anything,” said Chestnut.

At the low end of open and click-rates are health-and-beauty marketers, achieving an average open rate of 15% and an average click-through rate of 0.12%.

“I don’t know what the people in health and beauty are doing,” said Chestnut.

Meanwhile, marketing and publishing faired pretty well.

A category of business who identified themselves simply as “marketing” achieve an average open rate of 21.59% and a click though rate of 4.73%, according to the study.

Publishers achieved an average open rate of 45.98% and an average click rate of 9.85%, according to MailChimp.

Interestingly, the category that clocked in the highest spam complaint rates was legal services with an average abuse complaint rate of 0.24%. All but two other categories—insurance at 0.15%, music at 0.12% and travel at 0.1%l—kept their spam-complaint rates on average in the hundredths of percents.

Click here to see the whole study.