Email Open Rate: What is it & How to Improve it?
What is email open rate?
Email Open Rate is an important metric that is used in email marketing campaigns to measure the percentage of opened emails. It is the most basic measure of how well your email campaigns are performing. The higher the open rates, the higher the chances of the desired output from a campaign.
It is a percentage that is obtained by dividing the total number of emails that were opened by the total number of email subscribers to which the campaign was sent, not including bounces.
What is a good open rate for email?
Are enough people opening your emails? What if you make that small change in the subject line, how much of an impact will it have on the open rate? What are the average email open rates for your industry? It is the job of the marketer to find answers to these questions.
The average open rates for email campaigns in 2022 range between 15% – 25% for most industries. It is different for B2B and B2C organizations.
Tips to Improve Email Open Rate
Billions of emails are sent out every single day. Businesses are competing to get a small share of attention from their customer base. Customers want value and that is what differentiates your email campaigns from that of your competitors, that is what helps drive better customer retention.
Also, read Top 5 Components of Email Marketing to Improve Customer Retention.
The good thing is that improving email open rates is an achievable task. Sharing some tips below:
Make Your Content Engaging
Content is king.
Make sure to send campaigns with high-quality engaging content, highly relevant to the end user. The user should feel that your email is adding value to their lives. This will lead to the formation of trust, consistent high open rates in future campaigns, an increase in brand equity, and therefore, an increase in sales.
Remove Hard Bounces
A hard bounce indicates some permanent issue with the recipient’s email. It may occur if the email address is invalid or if the domain name does not exist.
Sophisticated CRM tools automatically remove hard bounces to increase open rates for future campaigns. Make sure to review these in campaign stats and actively work on them.
Personalize Emails and Focus on Relevant Segments
An email meant for customers in India might be completely irrelevant for customers in the US. Therefore, it is highly recommended to create and use specific segments based on a number of demographic, geographic, and behavioral data points.
Personalizing emails increases open rates significantly. A “Hey, David” in the subject line will have more impact on the recipient than a simple “Hey there”.
Focus on the Subject Line
One of the most important factors, if not the most important, in deciding email marketing open rates is the choice of the subject line to use.
It is a good idea to personalize the subject line, keep it simple, and direct, and avoid spam words or terms in your text.
Perform A/B testing for different subject lines with the same email body to measure the difference in campaign statistics.
Customize for Mobile
Most of us are getting more comfortable with checking emails on our mobile devices these days. This highlights the importance of optimizing the campaign for responsive email designs that look great on any device that the user may operate. Focus on font, image sizes, layout and color options.
Make sure to test your campaign on different devices before it is finally triggered.
Experiment with A/B Testing
A/B Testing is a very useful feature that lets the marketer send a number of variations of the same campaign to specific subsets of the users.
Each variation may have differences in terms of subject lines, email content, images, videos, CTAs, and other email elements. The ultimate goal is to find the best variation from the test and use that for the rest of the users in the email list for better conversions against goals.
Schedule Mails Based on Previous Stats
Modern CRM tools let you generate past reports that will include metrics like open rates, CTRs, conversions, and the time at which the campaign was triggered. All of this data speaks a lot. Study it well, know your customers, know your best campaign trigger times, and plan future campaigns based on this information.
Have a Good Follow-up Strategy
It is a good idea to automate the communication schedule by planning in advance the duration after which a follow-up email will be triggered if the user does not perform the desired action.
Flow or nurture campaigns can be set up with an entry and an exit condition that will take the user on a journey depending on the actions that they perform.
Follow-ups are a great way to remind the user that you have something that is of interest to them.
Wrapping Up
In email marketing campaigns, the basic thing to focus on to drive better open rates is the choice of your email subject line. Better email open rates lead to better conversions and hence increase the bottom line for the company.
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FAQs
What is a good 2022 email open rate?
A good email open rate in 2022 is in the range of 15% – 25%, depending on the industry of your operations. If your open rates are lower than that, it is time to optimize your campaigns.
What is a good click-to-open rate?
The average click-to-open rate is 10% – 15% depending on the industry. It can be improved by working on subject lines and the email content. If it is low, your customers are not finding your emails valuable enough.