What’s a Good Email Open Rate?

So, many times we get asked by clients what’s a good email open rate?

When it comes to analyzing email marketing efforts many of us find ourselves asking the question “What’s a good open rate?” The easy answer is open rates  vary between 10%-40%, these are considered averages. In the real world, open rates tend to fluctuate based on a host of factors such as; send time, send date and vary with industry, list size, messaging, content and how nice the ISP was to you that day as well.

What does this mean for you or your business? The magic number to achieve is more up to your business model when it comes to open rates than a magic percentage. Lets face it campaigns based on insurance are not going to be quite as good as let’s say Apple giving away an iPhone in some contest. The best approach for finding a good open rate for your emails is to monitor your own previous and current rates and keep making improvements upon those numbers.

Some quick steps your business can take to improve open rates as well as click rates overnight:

Use Customer Data : Previous behavior is the best tool to find out what your customers will do next. If some of your customers only buy widget B and never respond to widget A emails, stop wasting time, effort and money on sending them emails they don’t want to see.

Personalize Campaigns : Pretty easy step but a lot of email campaigns never use it. One on one dialogue with customers breeds a better open rate than emails that look generalized and don’t really convey a sense of personalization. Including their name or some sort of personal touch is always best.

Test, Test, Test, Did We Say Test? : The number one flaw most campaigns never fly or get better is a lack of effort and testing we see it time and time again. Advertiser (a) ran a campaign it flopped, they changed 1 item it did better and they concluded that the campaign is not going anywhere and dump it, along with money and time. It takes skill and time to test different things out, since email is so dynamic trying only a few things is quite the let down on most campaigns. We’ve experienced far too many campaigns that start as flops and end in such success that our partners thank us for not allowing them to just quit after a single failure. Keep testing success does not happen on the 1st try, well at least not always.