Why chasing benchmarks can hurt your email performance

🚫 Industry benchmarks are bullsh*t - especially when you are using them wrong 🚫 Stop comparing your marketing metrics to companies playing a completely different game. The data you see should be a "cool fact" - nothing else. Your competitor's: • $250 CPL • 2.8% CTR • 50% demo-to-close rate All irrelevant. Why? Because they might have: ✅ Different positioning and sales motion ✅ Different stage of product-market fit ✅ Different brand awareness (that took YEARS to build) & trust in the market You’re not competing against their numbers — you’re competing against their context. Of course benchmarks have value.They help you spot outliers, sanity check your funnel, and sense-check your GTM motion. But chasing them? Stressing over them? Comparing blindly?That’s where teams go wrong. When you blindly chase their benchmarks, you start: • Making bad optimisation decisions • Killing experiments too early • Burning out your team • Wasting budget Instead: ✅ Benchmark against your own baselines ✅ Double down on what moves your revenue ✅ Optimise for your business model — not someone else’s highlight reel (which for all we know could be a lie, as Dave Chapelle would say "LinkedIn is not a real place") The game isn’t who gets the cheapest leads. It’s who builds the most durable, scalable growth engine. Focus on your own levers. Play your game.

The 30% Email Revenue Benchmark Is Pointless. Here’s Why: For years, agencies have pushed the narrative that “30% of your revenue should come from email.” Sounds authoritative, right? But here’s the problem— It’s meaningless without context. A brand selling impulse-buy jewelry isn’t the same as one selling supplements with long consideration windows and recurring purchases. Different industries. Different customer behaviours. Different buying cycles. Yet, many founders obsess over hitting this arbitrary “30%” as if it’s the gold standard. What happens? 1. Chasing numbers ⤷ Sending more campaigns despite declining engagement. 2. Audience fatigue ⤷ Burning out your list just to make dashboards look good. 3. Short-term hacks ⤷ Relying on flash sales to inject temporary revenue. And the reality is— Attribution itself is flawed. Just compare Klaviyo’s attribution windows by tweaking a single day—you’ll see revenue figures swing dramatically. So, which number is actually right? Neither. Because it’s the wrong question. The real question isn’t “Is email driving 30% of revenue?” It’s “Is retention marketing driving profitable, sustainable growth for the business?” Any agency fixated solely on attributed revenue is missing the bigger picture. Retention isn’t about hitting vanity metrics—it’s about how your strategies impact broader business KPIs. Yes, revenue matters. But if it’s your north star, you’re steering the ship off course.

The "30-40% of revenue from email" benchmark is very dangerous advice... Every agency will tell you yes. But that number is completely business model dependent (+ multiple other factors) and chasing it could be costing you. Here's an example: A brand scaling aggressively on paid ads. New customers coming in at volume every single day. Their email revenue sits at ~10%. Looks underwhelming in the Klaviyo dashboard. But zoom out, when you're pouring budget into acquisition, total revenue is inflating fast. Email's share of that number shrinks automatically, even if email is doing its job perfectly (unless you have attribution and flows set up in a way that inflates this, which is very easily done). And its job here isn't to drive new revenue. It's to make sure all those paid customers actually stick around long enough to be worth acquiring. The benchmark causes brands to: → Over-send promotional emails → Neglect retention flows that don't show up in attribution → Measure email performance the wrong way for their model → Track the completely wrong data Figure out what email should be doing for your funnel, then optimise for that. That's how you build true retention.

Stop comparing your email performance to "industry standards." Blindly chasing benchmarks is setting yourself up for failure. "Industry averages" lump you in with brands that have nothing in common with yours. Here are two real brands we've worked with: 🧴 Brand A sells luxury skincare for anti-aging. High price point, considered purchase. Targeting women 45+ who research extensively. Products last 60-90 days. 🧴 Brand B sells affordable daily face wash. Low price point, impulse buy. Targeting Gen Z who buy based on trends. Products last 30 days. Both get categorized as "beauty & personal care." But the customer behavior is COMPLETELY different. The purchase decision timeline is different. The replenishment cycle is different. The level of brand loyalty is different. The type of content that resonates is different. Yet benchmarks would tell you they should perform the same. This is why cookie-cutter strategies fail. So yes, use benchmarks when you're just starting out. But once you have your own data... Establish your baseline Track your patterns Improve against yourself That's the only comparison that matters. Stop stressing over metrics that weren't built for your business.

Industry benchmarks are overrated. There, I said it. Every year, reports from HubSpot, LinkedIn, WordStream, and many others tell B2B marketers what their numbers should look like. - A “good” CPL is under $150 - A “strong” Google CTR for fintech is 2% - Email open rates “should” be 25% And the list goes on and on... But here’s the problem: benchmarks don’t know your business. A $300 CPL could be a steal if your deal size is six figures. A 1% CTR might be fine if conversion rates are strong. A lower email open rate doesn’t matter if response rates are high. Your business is unique, from what you sell to how you sell it. Comparing yourself to industry averages is meaningless if it doesn’t align with your pricing, sales cycle, and audience. Instead of stressing over whether your numbers match a report, ask: - Are we generating the pipeline we need to hit revenue goals? - Are our lead and conversion metrics tracking in a way that makes sense for our business? - Are we measuring against our own historical data, not just an industry average? Because at the end of the day, the only benchmark that actually matters is the one that moves your business forward. #b2b #b2bmarketing #saas #advertising #measurement #growth