Your marketing team is telling you the last email newsletter you sent to your prospects had a 10% open rate. Is that good enough? A POS and payment technology provider’s email open rate, like other marketing metrics, is unique to the industry and your channel, so it’s not easy to find specific benchmarks that you can compare to your company’s marketing performance.

In our new e-book “Marketing Benchmarks for POS and Payments Solutions Providers,” The SkyRocket Group shares statistics based on our clients in this industry over the past decade, to let you see how your marketing campaigns stack up when compared to your peers.

Is 10% Good Enough?

The answer the question whether a POS and payment technology provider’s email open rate of 10% is good enough is: maybe … maybe not.

One thing that has become apparent to us over the years is that you will get different results when marketing to channel partners than when you market to end users. For marketing campaigns that target an authorized reseller partner base, email open rates — as well as click-through rates — will be higher. We typically see open rates between 25% and 34% for these clients.

But when your email is directed at end users, open rates are often a function of list data quality and are typically lower. For our clients, it’s typically 8% to 16%.

So How Can We Improve Open Rate?

Regardless of what a POS and payment technology provider’s email open rate is, there is always room for improvement. A good first step is to clean up the data in your list. If you purchased names rather than building a list from qualified marketing leads or if you have been adding names for years but never deleted bad data, the rate will be lower. Do the math: A bigger list with fewer interested people equals a lower percentage of people who will open an email from you.

Once you are confident you are sending emails to qualified prospects, you can also try:

• Personalization: Using the person’s first name in the greeting and customizing content to individuals can help with open rate.
• Segmentation: Segment your email database to deliver more targeted messaging to subscribers. This is especially effective for industry focused email blasts to subverticals, for example, if you have a solution designed for clothing retailers, segment the list and tailor content for shoe stores, department stores, and athletic wear stores.
• Valuable Content: Maybe it goes without saying, but if readers don’t perceive email content to be valuable, especially the subject line and content that is visible as prospects sort through their inbox, they won’t open the email.

Make Changes and Monitor Performance

Take note of your business’ email open rate now and use that number as a baseline.

Make one change at time and watch for trends or conduct A/B testing to see if different subject lines, different content, even a different newsletter format would make a difference.

Also pay attention to newsletters that perform exceptionally well (or poorly). Look for differences in those newsletters that can provide clues into what resonates with your prospects — and repeat what works well.

To compare your marketing performance against other POS and payment technology providers, download “Marketing Benchmarks for POS and Payments Solutions Providers.” This e-book includes more information on technology provider’s email open rate and other email marketing metrics, such as click-through rate and deliverability, as well as benchmarks for website traffic, lead generation, and social marketing.