Email Marketing Market: The Many Pitfalls of Digital Marketing Benchmarks

This article explains why digital marketing benchmarks often vary across sources and can mislead marketers. Key factors include bot filtering, differing metric definitions (especially regarding Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and auto-open counting), platform defaults like double opt-in, and variations by industry and country. The author advises using benchmarks from your own platform provider, segmenting by industry and country, and comparing year-over-year changes rather than raw numbers. Importantly, most published benchmarks measure channel health (opens, clicks, deliverability) rather than revenue or conversion performance. The article emphasizes that benchmarks cannot account for a brand's specific practices and should be supplemented with self-run tests and holdout experiments.