Judge your email results against B2B norms
Benchmarks are useful for one thing: knowing whether a number is a problem before you spend a week on it. The ranges below are what B2B programs typically report across the major email platforms; your own list, your industry and how the mail app counts opens all move them. Read your results against the range, then against your own history, which is the better benchmark. For your numbers, ask “how did our emails do last month” or open the Email analysis.
The ranges
| Measure | Typical B2B range | Worry when | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery rate | 97% to 99% | Below 95% | Old addresses, a list bought or scraped, or a domain reputation problem |
| Open rate | 20% to 35% | Below 15%, or a sudden fall | Subject lines, sending to people who never asked, or the mail app stopped reporting opens |
| Click rate (of delivered) | 2% to 5% | Below 1% | The email has nothing worth clicking, or the audience is wrong |
| Click-to-open rate | 10% to 20% | Below 8% | The subject promised something the body did not deliver |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.1% to 0.3% per send | Above 0.5% | Too often, too irrelevant, or a list that never opted in |
| Hard bounce rate | Under 1% | Above 2% | Stale addresses; stop sending to them before the provider does it for you |
| Spam complaint rate | Under 0.1% | Above 0.1% (Gmail’s own line is 0.3%) | People did not expect the email |
Ranges are what B2B programs commonly report; they are a sanity check, not a target. Opens are inflated where Apple Mail and some corporate gateways open every email on arrival, so lean on clicks and replies.
How to read your own numbers
- Compare like with like. A newsletter to the whole list and a nurture email to 200 warm leads should never sit on the same chart.
- Clicks and replies are the steady measures. Open rates moved when mail apps started opening emails on their own; a 45% open rate with no clicks means nothing was read.
- Your own trend beats any benchmark. A 22% open rate is fine if it was 21% last quarter, and a problem if it was 34%.
- Watch the denominator. A rate of delivered is not a rate of sent; a bounce shrinks the first and not the second.
What to do when a number is outside the range
| Symptom | First thing to check | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Opens fell suddenly | Did the mail app or your tool change how it reports opens? | Look at clicks over the same weeks; if they held, nothing happened to your readers |
| Clicks low, opens fine | Is there one clear link above the fold? | One email, one ask; move the link up; cut the second and third asks |
| Unsubscribes up | How often did the same people get email this month? | Cap sends per person per week; see Decide how often to email |
| Bounces up | When were the bouncing addresses added, and by what? | Suppress hard bounces; verify addresses at the form; stop importing lists |
| Delivery down | Is your sending domain authenticated (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)? | Fix authentication first; warm up a new domain slowly |
How MarqIQ checks it
The Email analysis reads your sends and reports each rate against the right denominator, flags opens that look inflated by mail apps, finds the subject-line patterns that did better or worse for your list, and names the best day to send from your own history. The Audience health analysis counts how many people you can still reach. Ask “what is our email open rate” or “which emails performed best” for your numbers.
Next steps
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