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Gaming Your Open Rates
If you ask Google or ChatGPT what a good open rate for email marketing is, they’ll suggest 15-25% represent baseline averages. So is the take-away if your open rate is below that, your email marketing campaigns are underperforming?
No way. Open rates are relative to industry, offer type and to the unique blend of relationships you maintain. More importantly, in the OKR scheme of things, open rate is more a key result, less an objective. Your objectives are to deepen engagement and potentially transact with your subscriber base. Gaming your email subject line to increase the open rate may improve your upper funnel metric, but will have zero impact on people’s payment decisions. Interim success metrics mean nothing without follow-through.
I’m not telling you to avoid personalization or dynamic population, or to avoid sometimes creating urgency in your subject lines. Instead, I’m suggesting subjects should summarize content accurately and avoid the bait and switch. They can include direct references to their names, urgency around timing, scarcity of limited offers, just as long as it ties in with the content. When you set the right expectations up front, both interim and final success metrics will improve in parallel.
