What's considered a good open rate for email campaigns?

Email marketing is nothing new, in fact it pre-dates social media and is something many marketers have a love-hate relationship with. We know email marketing can be an extremely effective way to convert your audience into customers and encourage repeat business, but doing it well can be a challenge.

One of the biggest concerns we hear from marketers and business owners is getting their email opened.? They're often looking at their reports and seeing what they would consider to be a low open rate on a campaign and are concerned there's something they're not doing right or could do better.

So, what is a good open rate for email campaigns and should you be concerned about yours?

Firstly, let's cover off some of the basics...

What do we mean by open rate?

Open rate is simply the percentage of people who open your email. So if you sent an email to 1000 people and 250 opened your email, your open rate would be 25% ((250/1000)x100).

How is open rate measured?

Email marketing software cannot visit the inbox of each of your recipients to see whether your email was successfully delivered or know whether a person clicked your email to open it. However, they can see when a file contained within your email has been requested from their server.

In the case of most email marketing software providers, this file is usually a tiny transparent image in your email that isn't visible to the user. When an email is opened, this image is requested from the server and this is then recorded by the email service provider and will show in your reports as an "open".

This figure can be skewed by platforms such as Outlook's desktop app that doesn't download emails by default (you need to right click to download images). If a user views your email, but doesn't download the images, it may not register as an open, so you could assume that the open rate you see in your reports is on the conservative side.

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What's considered a good open rate?

Well, it depends!

Lots of factors can influence your open rate, for example:

• The product or service you're selling - if you sell something that people buy regularly, you may find your open rate is higher than someone who sells something people buy infrequently. For example, I regularly receive emails from the company who organised my wedding in 2009, but I rarely open them as I'm not planning on another wedding! Whereas, when I receive emails from Huel (something I buy regularly), I'm more likely to open them to see what's new and if there's any special deals to be had.
• How did you build your list? If your email recipients signed up to receive your emails voluntarily, they're more likely to open your emails when they land in their inbox. If you purchased a list, or use a list of old customers which didn't explicitly opt-in to receiving them (aside from being at risk of breaching GDPR) you're likely to see lower open rates.
• How old is your list? The more recent people signed up to your list, the more likely they are to want to receive your emails. Circumstances change and some recipients will lose interest in what we have to offer. It's just the natural churn, so we need to be replacing these emails and continuing to build our mailing list.
• Subject of the email - this can have a huge impact on your open rate from one campaign to the next. Together with the 'From' name, it's the biggest factor that influences whether people open an email. If your subject lines look dull, or spammy, it could reduce your open rate.
• Timing and frequency - do you send emails at unsociable hours? Do you send emails every day? Sometimes it's just a case of irritating our audience and they start to switch off whenever they see our emails landing in their inbox.

With a warm email list (i.e. people who have recently, voluntarily subscribed), we'd expect to see open rates around 20 - 25%, dropping to around 10-15% for purchased lists and old data.

We've seen open rates much higher for those with small databases of select customers and contacts, so there's really no hard and fast rule for what your open rate should be. The key is working to improve on what you're currently seeing in your reports.

However! If you want to benchmark your efforts against similar businesses, head on over to MailChimp's report for industry averages: https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/

This report also looks at average click rates, bounces and unsubscribes too.

Ways to improve your open rate

If you think your open rate could be improved, here are some ideas (and further reading) on how to improve your open rates:

1. Cleanse your list - Get rid of your 'non-responders'! If someone hasn't opened any of your emails in the last year, they probably never will, so it's time to say goodbye. Read more about the benefits of cleansing your email list.
2. Change the "From" name - do you send your emails from your company name? If so, try sending them from a person's name (and email). They look much more personal and less like bulk marketing emails.
3. Test subject lines - the subject line plays 2 roles. The first is to get your email past the spam filter and into the inbox. The second is to entice your audience to open the email. Read more about crafting the perfect subject line for better open rates here.

Your open rate is something you should definitely work on to improve the results you get from email marketing. If you find your open rate declines over time, this usually suggests an element of audience fatigue so it's time to review your list and look at how you can continue to add new people to your list to keep it fresh.

Think about who is on your list at the moment and how they got there. Ask yourself whether the content you're sending them is likely to be still relevant.

And finally, open rates will fluctuate from campaign to campaign, so it's important to look at averages over a period of time, rather than one campaign in isolation, to determine whether it's a trend or simply a one-off blip.