What is a good email campaign open rate?

The percentage of subscribers out of all of your subscribers who open a particular email is known as the email open rate.

While email open rate is crucial, no one metric should be used to establish your plan. Many people use their email open rate to gauge the effectiveness of their email marketing campaign.

Instead, think about a variety of KPIs and the objectives you have for your email marketing strategy.

Similar to this, you should consider how your email open rates are changing over time as well as how they relate to your particular industry when evaluating them.

This can help you learn how frequently recipients look forward to receiving your emails. Additionally, you’ll be able to identify the kind of content that interests your particular audience the most.

Are you providing the proper information to the most interested group in your email list, in addition to the worldwide challenges that may affect your email open rates?

Do you send out too much? Too little frequently? To determine your optimum open rate, you should test your email subject lines and preheader text.

The greatest way to increase your email open rates over time is to make sure that your company adheres to best practices for email marketing and sends high-quality content to the appropriate subscriber categories.

It results in a more invested and engaged audience for your brand. Investing excessive time on your subject line will simply improve open rates by industry.

What exactly is an open rate?

The percentage rate at which emails are opened is measured by the email marketing indicator known as “Open Rate.”

It is a broad indicator of the subject line performance, but for online marketers, it may be a misleading number.

What constitutes a “good” open rate?

Email open rates typically range between 15% and 30% across most industries, according to Mailchimp benchmark surveys, which also include both small as well as Fortune 500 clients.

Marketing themes (such as e-commerce, coupon offers, and so on) trend downward while topics of personal interest (such as religion, hobbies, and photographs) trend higher.

The least amount of people opens daily deals. In general, businesses have little motivation to aim to raise their open rates over the industry norm.

Although doing so seems like it might be advantageous for businesses, the majority of businesses will never realize a profit from their investment.

However, if a particular company’s rate is much below average, they are aware that improvements can be made.

Why open rates are a deceptive metric for measuring success?

What counts is how many of those people move forward through the sales funnel and become paying customers, not how many people ultimately read a company’s communications.

Emails with a high open rate may cause users to become irritated with the sender; on the other hand, emails with a lower open rate may have a greater conversion rate.

When A/B tests subject lines in an email campaign, open rate can be utilized as a supplemental indicator.

It can also serve as a long-term predictor of brand goodwill; when open rates rise, consumers’ trust may also be rising.

How Can You Raise Your Open Rate?

One of the most crucial performance indicators you can monitor is your open rate, and not only to evaluate how you fare against the competition.

Although click-through, conversions, grievances, unsubscribes, and forwards all contribute to a successful email marketing campaign, none of them matter a whit until your emails are opened in the first place.

The best campaign won’t succeed without a high open rate. For this reason, we’ll explain what constitutes a decent email open rate and how you may raise it.

Let’s briefly discuss how to determine an email open rate before moving on to what tends to make an open rate stand out.

The Best Way to Determine Your Email Open Rate

Your email open rates have already been determined if you use one of the top email service providers. But just so you know, the number of unique opens is divided by the total number of emails sent, minus the number of bounces, to determine your email open rate:

Your open rate is the proportion of recipients who actually opened your email out of the total number of recipients.

Now that you are aware of how to determine your open rate, let’s move on to the crucial issue. What is the typical email open rate you can anticipate?

What is a desirable email open rate?

Depending on the sector you’re in, a healthy email open rate should be between 17 and 28 percent. Knowing these figures is a terrific place to start, but it’s also important to research the industry average and compare your email marketing metrics to those of your own.

What percentage of email marketing & newsletters are typically opened?

Campaign Monitor’s 2022 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report states that the industry average email open rate in 2021 was 21.5%. The industry average increase from 2020 is 3.5%.

The average open rate for the top three industries—education, agriculture, and financial services—is between 25 and 28 percent.

Benchmarking Your Open Rates in 5 Easy Steps

Even if you are aware of the typical open rates for your sector, you cannot realistically establish a target for your email open rates without first comparing them to your present performance.

To measure your own email open rates, follow these 5 steps:

1. Chart Your Open Rates for the Past 1-4 Quarters

The first thing you should do is review every email you’ve sent in the last three to twelve months. Chart your open rates for each and every broadcast email you send, as well as any other statistics you wish to keep track of, such as click rates, subscription rates, response rates, etc.

2. Establish Your Average Open Rate

You may now determine your average open rate for the last 1-4 quarters as well as averages for other variables. Add together all of your individual open rates and divide by the total number of emails sent during that time period to determine your average open rate for that time period.

This is the starting point. Remember to set up a benchmark for your other desired data as well.

3. Identifying Outliers

Next, examine any outliers, both positive and negative. Did a certain email do very well or horribly?

Have you got an idea as to why it faired better than or worse than the others, if so? Every one of these outliers should be noted.

4. Search for Trends

Next, search for any emerging trends. Does a certain issue do exceptionally well or horribly? What about the time you sent it? What time of day performs better or worse than usual?

What subject lines were more successful or less successful? Take notes and apply this knowledge to your upcoming campaigns.

5. Set goals.

Lastly, decide on a target for your open rate (and other performance metrics). How much more would you like your stats to be better than the baseline?

Returning to the industry averages at this time can help you determine where you stand. But don’t become fixated on these figures. Use them to assist you in setting a reasonable objective for yourself.

Four Reasons for your low open rate

Your open rates can be significantly lower than the industry standard. In that situation, there can be a problem that needs to be solved. Your email open rates may be lower than they should be for the following 4 reasons:

1. Unsuitable customers

Expect open rates that are significantly lower than the sector average if you bought an email list. Never, ever buy an email database! The same is true for subscriber lists that were acquired improperly.

2. Not dividing up your list.

You won’t ever get the level of interaction you want if you send the same email to every individual on your list.

3. A large number of inactive subscribers

Your email deliverability to inboxes may suffer if a large portion of your list is inactive and hasn’t interacted with your emails in a while, and your open rates will drop as a result.

4. Monotonous subject lines

Focus on writing captivating email subject lines if you’re serious about raising your open rates. These are the primary causes of a possible poor email open rate for you. To learn how to permanently resolve these issues, continue reading.

Ideas to Boost Email Open Rates

You have now gained knowledge on the average email open rate for all industries as well as the particular open rates for each industry.

You are aware of how to evaluate your own email open rates and are aware of the top 4 causes of low email open rates. Let’s get into specific techniques to increase email open rates now.

1. Select the Right Subscribers

Make sure to qualify everyone with a pertinent lead magnet before asking them to subscribe to your email list. Avoid attempting to add everyone and anyone to your email list.

Avoid giving away something that the majority of people would want, like an iPad. Give out something that only your intended audience would desire, such as a free sample of your product.

An active email list with high-quality leads is what you want.

A small list of engaged and interested subscribers is considerably preferable to a large number of uninterested subscribers. Do you want to organize a giveaway?

2. Subdivide Your List

The majority of marketers send all of their emails to their whole list. This is a sloppy method of email marketing, and it is unsuccessful.

Consider segmenting your list according to interests, past purchases, location, etc. to ensure that your emails are genuinely being opened.

Your email list members will be more engaged and show greater interest in the emails you send them if you do this.

In actuality, segmented email campaigns outperform non-segmented campaigns by 14.31%.

3. Get Your Timing Right

Sending emails with no one even reading them is pointless. Make sure your email is sent to your prospect’s inbox at the ideal time to maximise your chances of delivering a successful message.

It’s crucial to send emails at the proper time if you want to increase open rates. Email openings perform best in the late afternoon, peaking at 3 p.m.

Naturally, you’ll want to look at your own data to determine the peak activity times for your subscribers.

4. Use both curiosity- and direct-based subject lines

When you provide the recipient clear information about what to expect in the email, they are more likely to read it because it is something they are interested in. A direct subject line would be, “How to Get 5K Subscribers in 1 Month.”

Contrarily, an intriguing subject line makes recipients want to open. They do it because they want to know what’s in the email. A curious subject line would be, “I can’t believe this just happened…”.

Both kinds of subject lines ought to be utilised in your email marketing initiatives. By doing so, you can keep your subscribers interested and increase the likelihood that they will open your emails.

5. Eliminate Dormant Subscribers

Deliverability will suffer if you have a large number of inactive subscribers on your list, as we said previously. Consider removing inactive subscribers from your email list without hesitation.

Send a win back email campaign to a subscriber if they haven’t interacted with any of your emails in the last six months or so in an effort to re-engage them.

You’ll have to either unsubscribe them or transfer their email to another list which you only email infrequently if they don’t get back in touch with you.

Use a list cleansing service, like TuxMailer, BriteVerify or TowerData, if you discover that you have a large number of inactive subscribers or haven’t emailed your list in a while.

6. Make subject lines mobile-friendly

Did you know that over 70% of your email openings occur on mobile devices? Depending on your product, target market, and email format?

The first thing that can draw a prospect’s attention to your email in particular is the subject line. You probably won’t enjoy checking every single email like that if you receive fifty emails a day with the subject line “Hello.”

Keep your email subject lines short to increase the likelihood that they will be opened on mobile. The sweet spot is between 6 and 10 words, or 25 characters.

In this manner, they will be readable even by mobile users. Before choosing your topic lines, you should also confirm how they will appear on mobile.

You may use TestSubject, a fantastic free tool from Zurb, to find out exactly how your subject lines will look on different devices.

7. Get Past Spam Filters

Avoid words and phrases that are frequently used in spam. Never use a lot of exclamation marks or ALL CAPS, which is the equivalent of screaming through email.

Analyze the bounceback records if you discover a campaign’s bounce rate is exceptionally high; they can reveal why your email was marked as spam.

8. Use the From Field Wisely

A reader is considerably more inclined to delete an email or even click the dreaded “Report as Spam” button if they don’t identify the sender.

Therefore, be careful to use something other than your email address in the From section, such as your name or the name of your company.

9. Your email should end with a compelling call to action.

Don’t overlook reminding your prospect to respond to your email if you want to improve your chances of getting a response. This is why call-to-action (CTA) buttons are employed.

Avoid stuffing your emails with CTAs, but a few won’t do any harm.

10. Remove Hard Bounces

Hard bounces, or emails sent to addresses that are no longer valid, may cause your open rate to artificially decline. Remove these addresses from your email list.

11. Use Focus Lists

Use focus lists to help you send emails only to the recipients who need them. Increased chances of being opened arise from this.

12. Message Format for Mobile Users

These days, a lot of individuals read their messages on their cellphones, thus your messages should be designed appropriately.

Conclusion

It’s now up to you. Assess your email open rates using the aforementioned 5-step procedure. Set a reasonable objective for increasing your open rates after comparing your results to the industry average.

Psssssst! Did you realise that every every year, the size of your email list shrinks by roughly 22%?