Email Open Rate

Email open rate is the percentage of subscribers that open your emails. Businesses calculate email open rate with a simple formula. Take the total number of messages subscribers have opened and divide by the number of messages you have sent. Convert this decimal answer into a percentage by moving the decimal two spaces to the right.

Let’s say you sent out 100 emails. In total, 40 subscribers opened them. Dividing 40 by 100 equals .40, so your email open rate is 40% according to the open rate formula.

What Is A Good Email Open Rate?

In 2020, the email open rate was about 21% across all marketing industries. While that number is a good guide, use your own metrics to judge success. Compare your current email open rate to previous campaigns.

More niche topics have higher email open rates than broader campaigns, but often serve small consumer bases. The open rate of emails is better judged by comparing it to your own progress. The average open rate varies widely across industries.

What Factors Determine Email Open Rate?

Calculating email open rate is simple, but many components influence it, such as:

• Your industry
• The time of day
• Day of the week
• Subject line
• Name of the sender
• Email frequency
• Content

Plain-text emails cannot be taken into consideration. For messages to count towards the open rate of your emails, they must include HTML and images. Your recipients must also have these features turned on in their web browser or email software.

How to Improve Email Open Rate

In March of 2021, spam emails accounted for 45% of all emails. Don’t let your email campaigns fall into that category. Having your emails sent to the spam folder is more harmful than recipients unsubscribing completely.

Take every factor into consideration. If your emails have great content, but you flood your subscribers’ inboxes with multiple emails per day, they may be less likely to open all of them. Maybe you have eye-grabbing subject lines, but your emails go out early in the morning and get buried before subscribers see them.

Schedule your emails and prevent them from bouncing. Many businesses automate email marketing to create a consistent schedule and maintain contact lists so emails don’t go to invalid addresses.

Make emails accessible. To improve email deliverability, use marketing software that puts your content into templates that subscribers can read on mobile devices and desktops.

Monitor your analytics. Don’t send emails and forget about them. Check your success with real-time email monitoring services.

Personalize email newsletters. Use subscription forms to get emails to the right sector. Using this data, make personalized emails that grab readers’ attention.

Use test campaigns. Utilizing an A/B email testing module, send out two emails to determine what works best for your consumer base.

Overall, balance these tools with stellar, engaging content. All the marketing knowledge in the world can’t save a low email open rate from bland, useless content. Have a clear goal in mind and give your recipients a reason to look forward to your emails.