We just added that information to MailChimp’s email marketing reports.

Now, when you open up your email campaign’s stats, you can compare your open rate, click rate, and bounce rate to other companies in your industry (we analyzed over 170 million emails to get this information):

Click the screenshot to zoom in:

The nice thing is we also show you how you compare to your own average (for that list), so you can see if your campaigns are improving or not. In the email campaign report above, my campaign got a 47.5% open rate, which is way better than the IT/Technology industry’s average open rate of 19.6%. But before I go asking my boss for a raise, I can see that my open rate actually fell from my normal average of 50.4%. Uh-oh. Maybe it was my subject line, or the day I sent my email, or the timing. Time to start optimizing!

Thought I’d post another interesting observation from a handful of campaigns that ran A/B Split Tests on their subject lines (company names disguised as “Acme”). The first 4 are from the same company, sending emails for 4 different web properties that they run…

In almost all the examples above, the subject line with “free” had a lower open rate. So should you avoid the word “FREE” in your subject line? In my opinion, don’t use “free” if it detracts from relevance. If you replace your company name with “free” or if you remove the urgency with “free,” your open rate is going to suffer.