Since Ray Tomlinson sent the first email forty years ago, email has become a dominant communications channel. Today, it’s one of the best ways to turn your customer experience into a competitive advantage. Maybe the best.

Whether you’re a media group looking for all-star results—or a local publisher that needs to manage email marketing with a minor-league budget—there are some brand-new trends out that demand your attention. 

Media Benchmarks Are Here

Our sister brand Campaign Monitor recently released a 2021 Email Benchmarks Report for media groups with insight into overall email performance for the last year. Compared to other industry averages, media fared quite well. Across media industries, the report highlights a surge in email volume and performance in the early months of the pandemic, especially March and April. And key performance indicators averaged across the year like open rate, click-through rate, and click-to-open rate all saw YoY increases. 

People who were stuck at home turned to email (among other digital content channels) as a preferred information source for everything from entertainment to information, promotions, and deals. This gave publisher emails a big boost, helping the industry perform well above the average across the entire year.

Publisher and media email marketing performance:

  • Average open rate: 21.3%
  • Average click-through rate: 3.7%
  • Average click-to-open rate: 17.5%

Another interesting discovery—turns out that Friday is now the top-performing day of the week across every KPI. That’s a major departure from past data, as Tuesday and Thursday have long been regarded as the best days to send email. Now, you can’t ever assume people are working full days in front of their computer.

It’s worth looking at your organization’s emailing schedules while people are still confined at home, and perhaps even after that, as millions of people opt into remote work and develop new online media habits.

After an unusual year, consumer behavior may never go back to where we were before the pandemic. Download the full report for key insights and actionable ways you can use this data to make the most of your email marketing efforts.