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 open 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.

Here's the email open rate formula:

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 open rates 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)

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 open rates 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.

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.

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. Verified Email can help you clean your email list to ensure you're sending your emails to the right people.