How to Actually Use Email Marketing Benchmarks (Without Losing Your Mind)

You just finished reading an email marketing benchmark report, and your open rate is below the industry average. Your click-through rate hovers around the median. Now you're wondering if you should panic, update your resume, or pretend you never saw the data.

Here's the truth: finding a benchmark is easy. Knowing what to do with it is where most marketers get stuck.

Benchmark reports are everywhere. They tell you the average open rate for your industry, the median CTR for B2B emails, the typical unsubscribe rate for enterprises. Useful reference points, sure. But if you stop there (if you treat those numbers as targets or verdicts), you're using benchmarks wrong.

Benchmarks aren't goals. They're diagnostic tools.

The real question isn't "How do we compare to the industry average?" It's "What do these numbers tell us about our performance in our specific context?"

Let's talk about how to actually use benchmarks to improve your email marketing without falling into the trap of chasing someone else's metrics.

The problem with treating benchmarks as scorecards

Most marketers encounter benchmarks in one of two ways: either as ammunition ("Look, we're above average!") or as indictments ("Why are we below the benchmark?").

Both approaches miss the point.

Benchmarks don't exist to tell you if you're winning or losing. They exist to help you understand whether your performance is an outlier, identify potential areas for improvement, and give you a gut-check on whether you're in the ballpark.

Think about it this way: if your open rate is 15% and the industry average is 25%, that's useful information. It suggests something worth investigating. But it doesn't tell you what the problem is, whether it matters for your business, or what you should do about it.

Context is everything.

Are you emailing a list of zombie contacts who haven't engaged in six months? Or are you emailing your top customers who talk to your sales team weekly? The performance gap between those two audiences should be massive. One might see a 10% open rate. The other might hit 70%.

If you compare those two campaigns to the same industry benchmark, you're comparing apples to submarines.

Benchmarks become useful when you apply them thoughtfully, when you layer in the context that makes your metrics meaningful.

The three-layer framework for using benchmarks

Here's how to make benchmarks actually work for you.

Layer 1: Internal benchmarks

Before you look at any industry report, benchmark against yourself.

How did your emails perform over the last six months compared to the six months before that? How do your promotional emails compare to your newsletters? How do welcome sequences perform relative to re-engagement campaigns?

Internal benchmarks give you a baseline that's specific to your audience, your content, and your sending practices.

This is where intuition starts to develop. If you examine your email reports consistently (not obsessively, just regularly), you start to build an internal barometer. You know when something feels off, when performance is trending up or down, when an anomaly is worth digging into.

The data verifies your instinct. Your instinct guides where to look in the data.

Internal benchmarking also forces you to think about context. If you send an email to customers who haven't heard from you in months, you don't expect a stellar open rate. If you send an email to engaged subscribers, you do. Comparing those two against each other doesn't make sense. Comparing each to their own historical performance? That tells you something.

Start here. Your own data, in your own context, is the most relevant benchmark you'll ever have.

Layer 2: External benchmarks

Once you understand your internal performance, external benchmarks provide orientation.

Industry reports tell you where "average" lives. They help you spot if you're wildly off-track or if you're in a reasonable range. They give you language to use when stakeholders ask, "How are we doing?"

But here's the catch: not all benchmarks are created equal.

If you're running email marketing at an enterprise with a distributed team, complex tech stack, and global campaigns, comparing yourself to SMB benchmarks is meaningless. Database size matters. Team structure matters. The tools you're using matter.

When you pull external benchmarks, look for reports that control for context. Are they enterprise-focused? Are they specific to your region? Do they segment by email type (promotional vs. transactional vs. nurture)?

The more the benchmark report matches your reality, the more useful the comparison becomes.

Use external benchmarks as a reality check, not a report card. If your open rates are dramatically lower than industry norms, investigate. If you're above average, great, but don't stop asking how you can improve. The goal isn't to hit the benchmark. It's to understand where you stand and whether that position makes sense given your strategy and audience.

Layer 3: Qualitative benchmarks

Here's where most benchmark discussions stop, and where they should actually get interesting.

Metrics tell you what's happening. Qualitative insights tell you why.

The best benchmark reports go beyond open rates and click-throughs. They ask questions like:

• How are marketing teams structured?
• What challenges are they facing?
• How are they adopting new technologies like AI?
• What does collaboration look like in distributed organizations?
• Where are the bottlenecks in campaign creation?

These insights help you benchmark organizational maturity, not just performance metrics.

If a benchmark report tells you that 60% of enterprises are struggling with approval workflows, and you're also struggling with approval workflows, that's valuable context. It tells you this is a common problem, not a personal failure. It suggests you should be thinking about process improvements or tooling changes.

If a report shows that AI adoption is accelerating in your industry, and you haven't started experimenting, that's a signal. Not necessarily that you're behind, but that you should be paying attention.

Qualitative benchmarking helps you understand trends, identify blind spots, and see where the industry is moving.

It also helps you have better conversations with your team. Instead of "Our open rate is below average," you can say, "I found a benchmark report that shows 40% of teams are dealing with speed-to-market issues. That tracks with what we're experiencing. Let's talk about what we can do differently."

That's a strategic conversation, not a defensive one.

How to apply benchmarks without chasing someone else's metrics

So you've read the benchmark report. You've compared your performance internally and externally. You've noted the qualitative insights. Now what?

Run a retro with your team.

Take the benchmark findings and use them as a lens to examine your own operations. Ask:

• Where are we performing above our own baseline? What's working?
• Where are we seeing declines or stagnation? What's changed?
• How do our results compare to industry norms? Are gaps explainable by context, or do they suggest a real problem?
• What trends in the report resonate with challenges we're facing?
• What should we test or change in the next quarter?

Benchmarks are conversation starters, not verdicts.

They help you see patterns you might have missed. They validate intuition or challenge assumptions. They give you language to talk about performance with stakeholders who might not live in email metrics every day.

But they don't tell you what to do. That part requires thinking through your specific situation: your audience, your content strategy, your tools, your team structure, your business goals.

A great benchmark report should make you curious, not defensive.

The true north principle

Here's something worth remembering: marketing hasn't fundamentally changed.

Tools evolve. Channels shift. New technologies emerge. But the core work (communicating clearly and effectively with people who have problems you can solve) remains the same.

Benchmarks tell you if you're drifting. They don't tell you where north is.

Your strategy tells you where north is. Your audience tells you where north is. Your goals tell you where north is.

If your open rates are below the industry average but your conversions are up and your revenue is growing, you're not failing. You're succeeding on the metrics that actually matter for your business.

If your metrics look great relative to benchmarks but your team is burned out, your approval processes are broken, and your campaigns take weeks to launch, you've got a different problem. One that metrics alone won't reveal.

Benchmarks help you see if you're clearing the bar. But you have to decide where to set the bar.

Permission to think for yourself

You don't need to hit every benchmark to be successful.

You need to improve your performance, in your context, over time. That's the game.

Use benchmarks to:

• Spot anomalies worth investigating
• Validate intuition or challenge assumptions
• Identify trends and blind spots
• Frame conversations with stakeholders
• Understand where the industry is moving

But don't let benchmarks dictate your strategy. Don't panic if you're below average on a metric that doesn't map to your business goals. Don't chase someone else's definition of success.

The best benchmark is always: Are we getting better at reaching our audience, communicating effectively, and driving outcomes that matter?

If the answer is yes, you're winning, even if the industry average says otherwise.

Where Knak fits in

At Knak, we've run enterprise email marketing benchmarks for years. One of the principles we internalized through this process was asking for more than just metrics. We wanted to understand the qualitative impact of those numbers: what challenges enterprise marketers face, how teams are structured, where bottlenecks live.

Our customers and the people who use these benchmark reports have adopted this retro approach. They look at the state of the industry, consider where they are against their own benchmarks and processes, then make thoughtful strategic choices based on that context.

We've done the same. Over the years, running these reports has helped us understand the real pains and challenges that enterprise marketers deal with. That understanding has shaped how we improve our platform. Our focus has always been on the enterprise problems that generic tools miss: brand governance across distributed teams, complex integrations in composable martech environments, collaboration at scale, organizational maturity.

Benchmarks are valuable when they reflect your reality. For enterprise marketing teams, that means controlling for the context that actually matters.