About Campaign Benchmarking

A benchmark is an industry standard you can use to compare your business to others like it. Campaign benchmarking helps put your email performance data in context, so you can better understand what you’re doing well—and what you may need to improve.

In this article, you’ll learn about campaign benchmarking in Mailchimp.

Things to know

• Campaign benchmarking is free for all users who opt in to Mailchimp’s data analytics projects. You can access this setting in your account defaults.

How it works

Our campaign benchmarking feature uses advanced data science to compare your email performance with that of your peers.

We analyze hundreds of millions of emails sent in Mailchimp to determine average open, click, and unsubscribe rates. Then, we use this data to develop personalized benchmarks for users who share certain industry and audience characteristics.

Here are the characteristics we use to set your benchmarks.

• Industry
  Your business type. This is either self-selected in your account defaults or predicted based on your campaign content. You can change your industry at any time.
• Audience demographics
  The overall gender and age range of the audience associated with your email campaign. This is based on the same data we use to generate predicted demographics.
• Audience size
  The total number of subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts in the audience associated with your campaign.

View campaign benchmarks

After you send an email and begin to collect engagement data, you’ll find campaign benchmarking information in your report overview.

Here’s what you’ll see in your benchmarking report.

• Characteristics you and your peers share
  The industry, audience demographics, and audience size we used to set your benchmarks. Click your settings to change your industry.
• How your email campaign compares
  A bar graph that shows how your email campaign measures against your average email campaign, as well as the average campaign of your peers. Click the Open Rate, Click Rate, and Unsubscribes tabs to switch between different types of data.
• Next best action
  A data-driven tip to improve campaign performance.

View Your Email Campaign Report
About Open and Click Rates