Email marketers put too much stock in external benchmarks, which can give them a distorted view of their performance and cause them to make ill-informed strategic and tactical mistakes.

That was the core message of my closing keynote for MarketingProfs' Modern Email Marketing Essentials.

Let's explore that issue and what B2B marketers can do instead of relying too much on external benchmarks.

How can you de-risk external benchmarks?

The first step is to ensure you're getting the most accurate benchmarks you can. You get the most accurate benchmarks when...

• Your email service provider provides them. That way, you ensure (1) the benchmark metrics are calculated the same way the metrics in your reporting are calculated, and (2) nonhuman opens and nonhuman clicks from bots and security and privacy tools are treated consistently.
• Your brand is in an industry that's dominant in your ESP's customer base, or the benchmarks are broken out by industry. Email performance benchmarks can vary substantially across industries on an annual basis and they can have significantly different seasonal patterns, too
• Your brand is in a geography that's dominant in your ESP's customer base, or the benchmarks are broken out by geography. Because of weather patterns, cultural differences, and variations in local marketing and privacy laws, email performance benchmarks can vary substantially across geographies on an annual basis and they can also have significantly different seasonal patterns.
• Your brand's rules for suppressing inactive subscribers are very similar to those of others using your ESP. That's mostly likely the case when using an ESP that serves smaller senders using pooled IP addresses; those providers tend to not only institute stricter inactivity rules but also enforce them universally. Using dedicated IP addresses and having your own inactivity tolerances increases the chances that your open and clicks rates will vary from the norm.

But even if you're able to tick all of those boxes, chances are that those external benchmarks are still an apples-to-oranges comparison in relation to your internal metrics.

How can you best use external benchmarks?

Considering how unlikely it is that external benchmarks align closely with your email marketing program, it's best to use them...

1. As guardrails. For metrics where higher is better (open rates, click rates), being better than 2x of the external benchmark is great, and being at less than 0.5x is dangerous. The inverse is true for metrics where lower is better (bounce rate, unsubscribe rate)—more than 2x of the benchmark is dangerous, and less than 0.5% is great.

   When you get close to those guardrails, it's worth doing some investigating to confirm you're doing great or to uncover why you're doing not so great.

2. For year-over-year changes. The delta from year to year is far more likely to be meaningful, as the underlying causes of that change are more likely to affect your brand, too. For instance, any macroeconomic changes would likely affect you roughly the same as other companies.
3. For month-over-month changes. The same logic goes for monthly deltas. Again, if you're seeing a big variance in the benchmark's delta and yours, then that's worthy of an investigation. And that's certainly the case if the benchmark's delta is positive and yours is negative.

4. For gauging the impact of inbox provider and ESP changes. In recent years, we've seen a lot of email platform changes, including new deliverability rules from Microsoft, tabs introduced to Apple Mail, new deliverability rules from Google and Yahoo, Hide My Email by Apple, and Mail Privacy Protection from Apple.

   Watching the benchmarks that are mostly likely to be affected by each of those changes and then comparing those benchmarks' deltas to your own metrics' deltas helps you assess the impact, if any.