report highlights

We examined the analytics from more than 163 million emails sent by over 450 utilities to provide the most robust, valuable Energy Utility Email Benchmarks Report yet. It's all to help you achieve greater customer engagement.

The overall rates show

  • 1 out of 5 utility customers opens an email
  • 1 out of 12 utility customers that opens the email clicks on something in the email
  • 7 out of every 10,000 unsubscribe, but only 2 out of 10,000 mark the email as spam

Customer satisfaction is the most important objective for surveyed utility communicators' email marketing strategy.

78% of all emails are opened within the first 24 hours. This is up slightly from last year.

24 Open Rate 78% of emails are opened in the first hour

Across all three audiences, as list size grows, the average Open Rate and CTR decrease.

For the second year, Welcome Series emails were the highest performing email category. Compared to the overall benchmarks, Welcome Series emails see:

  • 2 times the benchmark Open Rate
  • 2 times the benchmark CTOR
  • 3 times the benchmark CTR

50% of all Unique Clicks occur in 5 hours. Last year, it took 8 hours to reach 50% of clicks.

Clicks occuring in 5 hours 50%

3 out of 5 Residential customers open their emails on a mobile device.

Email Newsletter Readers are more likely to open other emails from their utility. They have an Open Rate 55% higher than Non-Newsletter Readers and a Click Rate 21% higher.

94% of utility communicators find email highly or somewhat effective with regard to achieving their corporate objectives.

Effectiveness for Utilities 94%

1 out of 2 customers Skim or Read emails. Over half of all audiences Skim or Read utility emails. They look at emails for at least two seconds.