Education, retail, and computer hardware/electronics are the best-performing verticals in email marketing, according to a recent report released by Silverpop that benchmarked open rates, click-through rates, and churn metrics across 14 industries and four geographic regions.

In addition, top marketers across all industries far outpace their peers—with top quartile performers achieving click-through rates nearly four times higher than the median (8.8% compared with 2.3%). 

Among the other findings: 

• Emails sent by top performers in the education vertical had the highest unique open rate (46.1%) and highest click-through rate (12.8%).

• The healthcare vertical had the best click-to-open rate (33%), which measures click-through rates as a percentage of messages opened.

• Bottom quartile performers had a hard bounce rate of 6.9%, while top quartile companies experienced a rate of only 0.1%.

Below, additional email marketing benchmarks and key findings from the 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Study:

Open Rate

Unique open rate  was defined in the report as the percentage of received messages that were opened by one recipient.

• Consumer products scored the highest open rate among industry verticals, tallying a median 25.4% unique open rate.

• While median open rates were fairly close across the board, top quartile performers achieved open rates more than four times higher than bottom quartile performers.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) was defined as the percentage of delivered email messages that drew at least one click.

• The education, healthcare, retail and consumer products/services verticals performed the best of the 14 industries studied.

Bounce Rate