What Is A Good Open Rate For Email Campaign?

What Is an Email Open Rate?

Your email open rate shows the percentage of people who open your marketing emails. A higher rate means more people are interested in what you're sharing.

Note that only unique opens count—If someone opens an email more than once, it only counts once. Emails that bounce don't count, either.

How to calculate email open rate

To measure how well your audience engages with your emails, use the open rate formula below. It shows the percentage of delivered messages that were actually opened:

So, if a shoe store sends emails to 1,500 subscribers, 220 bounce, and 1,100 are opened, the open rate would be 85.9%.

Factors Influencing Open Rates

In this digital age, where competition is stiff in all industries, it takes a great strategy to make your subscribers open your marketing email. Here are the factors that influence the open rate percentage of your marketing emails:

• Subject Line: If your subject line is generic, bland, or impersonal, it may not interest many people.
• Lack of Personalization: Adding the recipient's name could be a clincher for whether the recipient will open the email.
• Sending Frequency: People might not want to receive a marketing email from the same business multiple times a day—not even multiple times a week.
• Time of Delivery: The same thing applies to time. Your email will be disregarded during off-hours or on the weekends.
• Mobile-friendliness: About 42% of all emails are opened using a smartphone or tablet. If your email is not optimized for mobile, you're losing opportunities.
• Inactive Subscribers: Some recipients stop opening your emails or are uninterested in what you offer. Others change their email addresses.
• Spam Emails: If your email is marked as spam, it won't be delivered to your primary inbox.
• Content Quality: What you write in your email now will impact the visibility of your future emails. It also improves email deliverability. If it doesn't provide value, your subscribers won't open your subsequent emails.

Industry Average Open Rates and Benchmarks

What is a good open rate for email marketing? Generally, an open rate of 20% or higher is considered solid. A good email open rate is dependent on your:

• Industry
• Audience
• Message/Content Type

That being said, each industry is unique, so what is a good email open rate for your sector may not reflect with others and vice versa. Factors like email deliverability, offerings, viewer behavior, and market trends can all impact your open rate. To get the complete picture of your campaign's performance, you should also track:

• Click-through rates
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Click-to-open rates

Industry benchmarks

Top email marketing platforms release benchmarks every year or two. You can use these standards to evaluate your email campaign efforts. Here are the average open rates for overall industries from four industry leaders using substantial data in preparing their reports:

Average open rates per industry

Here's a selection of industries and their average open rates tracked by different platforms:

What is the average open rate for email marketing? Here are the average email open rates from different platforms across various industries, including sectors and niches:

• Electronics: 33.88% (includes computer games, hardware, consumer electronics)
• Business: 34.30% (consulting, freelancing, marketing, finance)
• Software: 35.92% (fintech, health tech)
• Media: 35.46% (news subscriptions, advertising platforms)
• Internet and Telecom: 39.96% (ISP newsletters, mobile carrier promotions, VoIP service updates)
• Healthcare: 34.64% with fitness companies like gyms
• Retail and Shopping: 35.90% (eCommerce stores, home goods suppliers)
• Finance: 26.48% (investment advisories, tax services, banking)
• Manufacturing: 32.03% (steel, automotive, component producers)
• Real Estate: 37.18% (brokerages, property management, realtors)
• Education: 37.35% (e-learning platforms, universities, schools, educational programs)

Average open rates by email type

Open rates also vary depending on the type of email you send. Transactional or triggered messages tend to perform better than bulk promotional campaigns because they’re more relevant and expected by recipients.

Here’s a comparison of open rates by email type based on recent industry data:

How to Increase Email Open Rates

Open rates are vital indicators of how well your email campaigns are doing. Here are some top tips to boost your engagement metrics and reduce bounce rates:

Keep your subject line dynamic

The subject line is your first "hello" to your subscribers. As such, it should spark curiosity and connect with the audience from the get-go. The value of your content should have the same energy as the value of your subject line.

• Use merge tags to personalize subject lines with the recipient's name or location. Using the recipient's name can boost open rates by 13% to 28%. Personalized emails generally get better open rates and work well with automated emails like birthday deals, post-purchase follow-ups, or promotions.
• Shorter subject lines are better for people who prefer checking emails on their phones. Aim for no more than 9 words and 60 characters.
• If you want to use an emoji, limit it to one. Emojis should complement words, not replace them, to ensure a clear message and not be tagged as spam.

Optimize audience segmentation

Email segmentation enables you to send tailored messages to your subscribers that connect. Rather than sending a generic message to all that may or may not address the needs of your audience, segmentation groups your recipients based on several factors. These include interests, demographics, behavior, past purchases, and more. Pick out what makes each segment unique and allow that to guide you in creating a more relevant and personalized email.

• Specificity is good, but apply it with caution. If you segment your audience too far, you must create too many different messages. That can be counterproductive.
• Test different combinations if you have already segmented your emails but the groupings don't work. Look for their common denominator and go from there. Use various elements and conduct A/B tests to see the tweaks needed to attract them to open your emails.
• Set a goal and be specific about it. For instance, segment your emails to increase your subscribers by 200 at the end of three months. Setting and measuring goals can provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn't in your marketing plan.

Verify and clean your email list

Your open rates depend on emails actually reaching inboxes. A high number of invalid, outdated, or mistyped addresses can lead to hard bounces, which hurt your sender reputation and reduce deliverability. Using an email verification tool like VerifiedEmail ensures that your list is accurate and up to date before you send a campaign.

VerifiedEmail performs real-time and bulk verification, filtering out invalid and risky addresses with a multi-layered process. It seamlessly integrates via an intuitive dashboard, REST API, and an embeddable widget, making it easy to maintain a clean email list without extra manual effort.

Check if your email is valid with VerifiedEmail

Verify

Unlike other tools, VerifiedEmail offers the same high accuracy and speed at a lower cost with flexible pricing. By reducing bounces, it improves inbox placement and ensures your messages reach real, engaged users—ultimately boosting open rates.

Resend unopened emails

It can be frustrating to know that your hard work in creating a compelling email isn't opened at all, but persevere. If your email wasn't opened, resend it. However, make sure to apply some changes. Start with a new subject line. You can also change the time and date of delivery—Tuesday is the best day.

Resend the unopened email once or twice. If your tweaks don't work, assess if an overhaul of your email marketing campaign is needed.

Taking your open rates to the next level

Once you've got your subject lines sorted, your list is in shape and your targeting is spot on, now is the time to really push your open rates with these super-useful tips:

• Give the sender a human face: You might be surprised just how much of a difference it makes to use a real person's name rather than a generic brand name in the “From” field. We've seen it work wonders for open rates in the past, so it's definitely worth trying both ways and seeing what your audience prefers.
• Tailor your sends to time zones and behaviour: Believe it or not, sending emails at the exact moment when your most active subscribers are online can really pay off. And the good news is that more and more ESPs are now making this super-useful feature automated for you.
• Keep on A/B testing: Preview text, emojis and send time need to be in your testing mix. You never know what's going to work a treat with your particular audience.
• Don't let inactive subscribers fall by the wayside: If recipients haven’t opened your emails after 60-90 days, then send them something special to get them back on board. A “we miss you” message or a special offer can do the trick.
• Stay on top of list hygiene: Get into the habit of cleaning your list every quarter to get rid of any dodgy addresses or people who've clearly moved on. It's worth the effort to keep your deliverability and analytics accurate.

Wrap Up

Tracking your email open rate is necessary to gauge if you're on the right path. Another essential thing is to use tools to improve your email marketing campaign further. VerifiedEmail can help you clean your email list to ensure you're sending your emails to the right people.