Atlanta—Email marketers experienced an average open rate of 19.7% last year, although top-performing companies had an open rate almost twice as high, a report from email marketing services provider Silverpop found. According to Silverpop's “2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Study: An Analysis of Messages Sent Q1-Q2 2012,” the companies in the top quartile of the study experienced average unique email open rates—defined as one open per recipient—of 35.7%. Average top-quartile open rates were similar to this throughout the U.S., Canada and the Europe/Middle East/Africa regions, but hit 44.6% among best-performing email marketers in the Asia-Pacific region. By industry, educational organizations experienced the highest average email open rate, at 26.2%, followed by consumer products (23.8%), financial services (22.0%) and computer software (21.4%) companies. For its study, Silverpop analyzed email of all types sent by 2,787 of client companies in 40 countries.