Resources Hub » Knowledge base » How to Calculate Email Open Rates

Designing and running an email marketing campaign is a lot of work, and the results are not guaranteed.

One key component that determines how the campaign will pan out is the open rate. Knowing how to calculate your email open rate is an important part of determining the success of your email campaign. Read on to discover how you can do that for yourself.

How to calculate email open rates

The email open rate is probably one of the most important metrics you should track in a campaign because it gives you insight into how people engage with your emails. It helps you know whether you need to tweak certain elements of your email or the campaign itself.

What is an email open rate?

The term email open rate refers to the number of unique opens your email receives in a campaign, expressed as a percentage.

Determining the number of emails that were read in a campaign can be tricky. In order for an email to be deemed as opened, one of 2 things must happen:

  • Your recipient must enable images to be viewed. This is because most email marketing software platforms embed pixels in emails. These help track whether an email has been opened or not.
  • A link within the email must be clicked.

Because these 2 factors are out of your control, the email open rate is actually an estimate and not an accurate figure.

How do you calculate email open rate?

You can calculate the email open rate of your campaign using the following formula:

Email Open Rate = Number of Emails Read / Number of Delivered Emails ×100

For example, if you send out 10 emails and 2 of them bounce, the number of delivered emails becomes 8. If, out of those emails, 4 are opened, your open rate is then 4/8 = 0.5. Multiplying that by 100 gives you an email open rate of 50%.

What is a good email open rate?

Email open rates vary from industry to industry and depend on the quality of your email list. However, the average email open rate across all industries is 17.92%.

how to calculate email open rate: here is a graph example of open rate benchmarks.

Source: Superoffice

This means anything from 15% to 25% and up is a good open rate.

Be careful of falling into competition mode when it comes to open rates. If your campaign is achieving good results with a 16% open rate, your campaign may be a success. It doesn’t necessarily have to match the average email open rate, as the averages can change depending on your industry.

Your email open rate is as unique as your campaign, list, and product are unique to you.

Does it really matter?

Knowing your email open rate does matter. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that it shows how your campaign is being received. If your open rate is high, it means you are doing something right and you should replicate your formula in the next campaign.

When your email campaign is met by low open rates, it’s an indicator that your email has failed to pique the interest of your subscribers. This is usually the result of a weak subject line.

In order for your email campaign to be successful, your emails have to be opened, so you need to do everything in your power to increase your email open rates.

What now?

Now that you know why your email open rates matter, it’s time to work on improving them. A couple of ways you can do that include:

  • Maintain an active list
  • Craft catchy email subject lines
  • Create relevant and valuable content
  • Segment your list

These are just some of the techniques you can use to ensure that your open rates, engagement, and revenue soar.

The biggest key to winning in email marketing is to get people to open your emails. If you need help in doing that, check out our article on increasing your email open rate in 9 days (or less).

This blog provides general information and discussion about email marketing and related subjects. The content provided in this blog ("Content”), should not be construed as and is not intended to constitute financial, legal or tax advice. You should seek the advice of professionals prior to acting upon any information contained in the Content. All Content is provided strictly “as is” and we make no warranty or representation of any kind regarding the Content.

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