Benchmarks Are BS (Unless You Know This First)

Benchmarks are everywhere. Open any industry report or SaaS blog, and you’ll find numbers telling you what your open rate, click rate, or conversion rate "should" be. Sounds helpful, until you realize those numbers weren’t built for your business. They’re averages. They overlook your business model, customer lifecycle, and growth stage.

Here’s the real talk: Benchmarks are BS unless you understand the context behind them. In this post, we’ll walk through why blindly chasing benchmarks can backfire, and how to build meaningful baselines that actually move your business forward.

Why Benchmarks Can Be Misleading

Benchmarks are meant to guide, not govern. And yet, some marketers will anchor their performance evaluations on them. Here’s why that’s a problem:

• They ignore your customer journey.
  A B2B SaaS brand with a 6-month sales cycle shouldn’t compare its email metrics to a flash-sale fashion brand.

• They reflect averages, not outliers.
  Most industry benchmarks lump together high-performers and underperformers, giving you a number that’s statistically safe, but strategically useless.

• They don’t account for past progress.
  You might’ve improved your open rate by 20%, but if it’s still below “industry average,” that success gets overshadowed.

How to Stop Benchmark-Chasing

Before you look outward, look inward. Build your own internal benchmarks using these three steps:

Step 1: Segment by Journey Stage

Don’t treat all emails or customers the same. Define metrics based on their journey phase (e.g., onboarding, win-back, or promotion).

Example: A 20% open rate on a reactivation email could be stellar, while the same rate on a welcome email might signal trouble.

Step 2: Track Performance Over Time

Use rolling averages across 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows. Identify trends, plateaus, or drops to isolate what’s working and what’s not.

Step 3: Compare Against Yourself, Not Just “The Industry”

Focus on relative improvement. Are your campaigns becoming more targeted? Are customers engaging more deeply over time?

When External Benchmarks Do Help

Let’s be clear: not all benchmarks are BS. They’re helpful when:

• You’re evaluating a brand-new lifecycle program with no prior data

• You’re presenting performance to stakeholders who expect some form of “industry validation”

• You’re diagnosing whether you’re way off-base (e.g., a 0.5% CTR when the average is 3% across all programs)

The key is to use them for context, as gut checks, not goals.

Build a Smarter Benchmarking System

Here’s how leading lifecycle marketing agencies build benchmarks that matter:

• Audit your past 6–12 months of campaigns
  Analyze by campaign type, lifecycle stage, and audience segment.

• Create “best-in-class” internal benchmarks
  Highlight your top 10% performers. Use them as your gold standard, not external MVPs.

• Set iterative goals
  Instead of saying, “We need a 25% open rate,” say: “Let’s improve our reactivation email open rate from 18% to 21% over the next 2 months.”

What This Means for Your Lifecycle Marketing

True performance isn’t about beating a number from an industry report. It’s about understanding what success looks like for your brand. Benchmarking should help you grow, not shame you into thinking you're behind.

Want to set performance standards that reflect your unique business and customer journey? Book a Lifecycle Accelerator with LEO to define benchmarks that actually mean something, and build a lifecycle program that performs on your terms.