Is any of this actually working?

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Find out what's actually working

Hi Emre,

 

You send the campaign, you glance at the open rate, and you move on. Most
months, that's the whole review of your email marketing strategy. Just going
through the motions.

 

September is a good time to do better than that. Q4 is close, and whatever you
plan for it will go better if you know which of this year's sends earned their
place in next year's strategy.

 

This issue includes a 15-minute email health check, the report that fills in the
blanks for you, and two new ways to build your next email.

 

Let's get to it!

Allie from Benchmark

Allie Wolff


VP, Product Marketing 

Tips

A 15-minute audit of your email program

Start with list health

Start with list health. Count how many contacts opened or clicked anything in
the last 90 days, then compare that to a year ago. The direction matters more
than the number. If more than 40% of your list has gone quiet over 90 days, you
have a list hygiene problem before you have a content problem. Unsubscribes
usually land between 0.1% and 0.5% per send, and anything over 1% is worth a
look.

Read engagement as a trend.

Read engagement as a trend. Pull three to six months of opens and clicks instead
of judging one campaign. Click rates between 1% and 5% are normal. Then divide
clicks by opens. That ratio tells you whether your subject line did the work or
your content did.

Check your deliverability signals

Check your deliverability signals. Hard bounces should stay under 2% per
campaign. Spam complaints over 0.1% are a warning sign, and 0.3% gets you
flagged by the major mailbox providers. Compare how your Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook,
and Apple Mail readers behave, because one weak inbox can drag the whole average
down.

Finish with content

Finish with content. Sort your campaigns by click-to-open rate and look at the
top three and the bottom three. Patterns show up fast. While you're in there,
open your welcome email and read it the way a brand-new subscriber would.

Want to put a number on all of it? walks through the math, including why a
healthy program returns at least $10 for every $1 spent →

The report that covers all of these bases

In Your Account

The report that covers all of these bases

Every check above lives in your reports. The Performance Overview covers 30, 60,
or 90 days across all your campaigns at once: open, click, and bounce trends
together, plus the send times your list actually responds to.

 

Click into any metric and you get the contacts behind it, not just the
percentage. Contact Activity shows the last 100 things that happened across your
list, filtered to the last 7, 30, or 90 days. If someone else needs to see it,
save the whole thing as a PDF with the charts intact.

15 new templates for every use case (including the holidays)

New Templates

New templates for every use case (including the holidays)

Once you know what's working, the next email shouldn't start from a blank page.
We just added about lots of new templates to the library, including a holiday
set for the stretch between Black Friday and New Year.

 

Pick one, drop in your content, match the colors to your brand, and you're most
of the way there.

Bring an email you built somewhere else

Feature Spotlight

Bring an email you built somewhere else

Not every email starts in Benchmark. A designer builds one, an agency sends over
the file, or you ask an AI tool for the code. Until recently there was no way to
send it here without rebuilding it block by block.

 

The HTML editor takes it as is. Paste the code or upload the file, watch it
render side by side in desktop and mobile preview, and drop in merge tags with
the Personalize picker. It sends exactly as coded, and everything else behaves
like a normal campaign: your lists and segments, scheduling, open and click
tracking, reports, and the compliance footer.

 

No coding required on your side. If the HTML came from an AI tool and it's a
little rough, the editor repairs the small stuff quietly and puts anything
structural in front of you in plain English before you send.

 

Asking AI to write it? We published a free prompt that tells Claude, ChatGPT,
Gemini, or Copilot to write for inboxes instead of browsers, which is where most
AI-written email HTML falls apart.

Are open rates dead?

You've seen the take by now: open rates are meaningless, stop looking at them.
There's something behind it worth understanding before you throw the number out.

Here's what's actually happening. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads the
tracking image in your email whether or not a person read it, so those readers
count as opens automatically. Gmail routes images through its own proxy.
Corporate security scanners fetch images and sometimes follow links before the
message reaches anyone. All of that inflates your opens, and none of it is a
subscriber deciding to read you.

The number still means something. It's noisier than it used to be, and how noisy
depends on who's on your list. A list full of Apple Mail readers looks better
than one that isn't, for reasons that have nothing to do with your email.

So treat open rate like a scale that reads a few pounds heavy. Watch the
direction on your own list over time, and don't compare it to anyone else's.
Then judge the campaign on the things a machine doesn't do by accident:

clicks on a specific link
replies
purchases, bookings, and signups
unsubscribes, which tell you something opens never will

Worth a read this month

Your October 2026 Email Marketing Calendar: 5 Emails to Send

Natalie mapped out five sends for October, with dates attached and subject lines
you can steal. If your October calendar is still empty, start here.

 

The Email Marketing Backlog: How to Organize Campaign Ideas Without Losing Them

Every marketer has campaign ideas that show up at 11pm and vanish by Monday
morning. This is a simple system for catching them before they disappear.

 

How to Create an HTML Email Using Benchmark's Claude Skill

Allie walks through the Claude skill that writes email HTML built for inboxes
instead of browsers. Paste the result straight into the HTML editor and send it.

 

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Accession

nse/benchmarkemail/2026-09-28/2755

From

Allie from Benchmark · allie@mktg.benchmarkemail.com

Sent

28 September 2026 · 19:00 UTC