Outbound Sales Metrics & Benchmarks (July 2024 Update)
Email metrics are your stepping stones to scoring bigger and better deals. Find out the metrics you need to track and their benchmarks.
Email metrics are your stepping stones to scoring bigger and better deals.
Tracking them gives you insight into what’s working and what’s not in your outreach. They can also signal if there are any trouble spots that you need to take care of.
Here’s a closer look at the outbound email metrics you need to track and their benchmarks (as of July 2024).
Outbound vs inbound
Before we dive deeper into outbound metrics and benchmarks, make sure you understand which of your campaigns are outbound and which are inbound for one very simple reason (especially if you’re new to tracking email performance):
Your outbound will do worse than your inbound.
If you’re not sure how to tell the difference, here’s a quick refresher:
- Outbound – Outbound involves contacting prospects who have not yet shown interest in your company. They may have never heard of your company altogether.
- Inbound – Inbound involves reaching out to leads who have shown interest in you, possibly by downloading a guide, attending a webinar, or networking with you at a conference. As a result, they’ve heard of you, and you don’t need to start from scratch as they have a higher purchase intent than cold leads.
Naturally, because you’re starting from scratch with outbound leads who have zero intent to buy your product, your email performance will be lower compared to your inbound results.
Outbound metrics and benchmarks
Here are the outbound email metrics you should be watching along with their performance benchmarks.
However, since these are just benchmarks, they’re only meant to serve as a guide or measuring stick rather than a hard truth.
Open rate (19% to 26%)
Open rate is one of the most common ways to measure the initial traction of email campaigns. It lets you gauge the appeal of your content and see if your subject lines catch the reader’s eye.
Campaigns with open rates under 15% indicate one of two problems:
- The subject line didn’t follow best practices for making it compelling enough to click on.
- There is a technical issue that’s dragging down performance.
Open rates can also help you identify leads who are inactive or unengaged, allowing you to clean and optimize your list for better targeting.
However, these insights are conclusions made based on the open rate. As a metric itself, open rate simply shows how many people received and opened your email.
Response rate (1.5% to 4.89%)
Your response rate will automatically be lower than your open rate. This is simply because only some people who open your email will send a reply.
And in the case of outbound outreach, since leads have never shown interest in your company, the reply rate will end up being a lot lower compared to your inbound reply rate.
Before you get too excited, keep in mind the response rate measures all responses, which could be positive or negative.
Positive response rate (0.4% to 0.6%)
Not all responses will be positive, but if you manage to get at least a quarter to a half of all responses to be positive, your outbound is doing very well.
Even if you can manage just 10% of all responses to be positive, you can consider your outbound a success.
Bounce rate (< 5%)
When an email bounces, this means that the email failed to reach the recipient’s inbox.
So long as only a few bounces occur, there’s not a problem.
But if lots of emails start to bounce, you’ve got a potential disaster in the works.
There are two types of bounces to be aware of:
- Soft bounce – This occurs when there is a temporary yet fixable issue. Examples include:
- Server issue on the recipient’s side
- Full mailbox
- Email is too large
- Auto-response was triggered
- Greylisting
- Hard bounce – This occurs when there is a permanent and unfixable issue. Examples include:
- Non-existent email addresses
- Invalid domains
- Blocked email addresses
- Syntax errors
- Rejected emails due to policy violations or spam
Soft bounces won’t harm your inbox reputation, but if a soft bounce isn’t fixed, the ESP may re-classify it as a hard bounce.
If you receive too many hard bounces, your account could be blocked.
Meetings booked rate (1% to 3%)
The end goal of most sales campaigns is to get a demo or call booked so that you can make a sales pitch and hopefully convert a lead into a paying customer.
Of course, whether or not a sale occurs during the demo is purely up to the person running the demo. But so far as outbound is concerned, outbound held up its end by getting a demo booked.
If your outbound isn’t getting a single demo booked, this is a major red flag and an indicator that your current outbound may be broken.
Click-through rate (0.7% to 4.4%)
Click-through rate (CTR) shows you how many people clicked on links in your email. Like the response rate, your CTR will usually be lower than your open rate.
If your CTR is lower than you’d like, you have some options available to improve it:
- A/B testing – You can try experimenting with different variations of your links (such as using questions versus CTAs) to see which resonates better with your recipients
- Optimal sending time – You can experiment with different times and days for sending emails to see when your audience is most responsive
- Quality control – You can check if your emails contain:
- A clear next step (i.e. a CTA that provides instructions)?
- Personalization?
- Timely, relevant content?
- Mobile optimization?
It can also help diagnose issues with your landing pages. For example, if your CTA is “Book a demo” and people are clicking on it, but they aren’t actually booking a demo, it could represent an issue with the demo booking’s webpage.
Unsubscribe rate (< 1%)
Measuring unsubscribes is straightforward. The fewer people who unsubscribe from your lists, the better. However, a 0% unsubscribe rate is almost impossible.
Although a high unsubscribe rate can be discouraging at first, you can adopt a more positive outlook.
Unsubscribes not only indicate that you’re fine-tuning your lead list, but you’re getting rid of leads who are more likely to mark your email as spam. In turn, this helps you shore up your sender reputation and avoid getting blocked.
Lead response time (5 to 10 min)
A wise man once said… “The fastest bird gets the worm.”
Nowhere is this truer than in the world of sales where faster response times lead to higher conversion rates. In fact, the majority of new deals go to the company that responds first.
If you’re not tracking the time it takes your sales team to respond, start now.
AiSDR helps companies reduce their lead response time to 5 to 10 minutes so that you never risk missing out on deals due to slow responses.
Opportunity Win Rate (10% to 19%)
Everyone likes to win. But what’s even better is being able to use those wins to generate even more victories.
By calculating the number of opportunities and deals that result in a sale, you can use your Opportunity Win Rate to:
- Identify similarities between deals so you can allocate resources to leads more likely to convert.
- Refine targeting criteria to adjust your ICP and find “look-alike” prospects
- Establish a feedback loop to fine-tune the quality of your email copy
Power your outbound campaigns with AiSDR
If your current outbound results don’t match these benchmarks, it doesn’t mean your outbound is broken. Several factors can impact your outbound, such as your target audience and campaign goal.
The best benchmarks are those that are determined by your past performance. That way you can measure your growth over time.
But if your outbound isn’t yielding the results you want, AiSDR can help by automating all outbound outreach so that you can focus on closing deals.
