What is an open rate?
Once you start dealing with email marketingYour open rate is something you want to think a lot about, work on and try to improve. The open rate is the percentage of subscribers who choose to open a particular email out of your total number of subscribers who received the email.
Many marketers pay a lot of attention to their open rate, maybe even a little too much. They do this to see how many people actually read their email and from there determine how successful the email was.
Work on your open rate
While open rates are important when it comes to email marketing, be careful not to be blinded by one number. Instead, consider multiple metrics and think about your goals.
Over time, you should also look at how your open rate is improving (or deteriorating). This will give you a better understanding of how often people want emails from you. From this data, you can also better determine what type of content is most interesting to your recipients.
So - are you sending the right content to the most interested segment? Are you sending too often? Are you sending too infrequently? You should also test your email subject lines and preheader text to increase the chances of a higher open rate.
The point of this monitoring is to ultimately ensure that you are following best practice principles in email marketing. It's also about making sure you're sending high-quality content to the real segments of subscribers and improve your open rate over time. This leads to a more engaged audience that is invested in your brand, which is better than spending large amounts of time on a subject line that will only lead to a (maybe) higher open rate for that one email blast.
Average opening rate
So at the end of the day, what is an average open rate and why is it important? An average open rate is a measure of how many email recipients open an email in relation to the total number of emails delivered within a campaign. You can of course choose to calculate it yourself, but typically you can also access this metric through the reporting features of your email service provider.
Otherwise, first subtract the total bounced emails from the total delivered emails to determine your open rate. Then divide this number by the total opened emails. An average email open rate can vary depending on the industry; a generally accepted open rate for an email campaign is 15%-25%.
However, there is a difference between lists, because as the list of email recipients increases, the open rate tends to decrease. Smaller lists are often more engaged, which is also seen when it comes to niches. They also experience higher open rates than emails on broader topics.
