If you’re an email marketer, you’ve probably been told many times how important metrics are to running a successful campaign.
Knowing stats like open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates allow you to course-correct your campaigns based on what you learn.
However, for this information to be useful, the metrics must be fully understood.
What is the average open rate of an email?
While the average open rate of emails is going to vary based on the particular audience of an industry, an open rate of 15% to 20% is considered normal.
With a spread like that, it’s best to find the average open rate for your specific industry and use that as your benchmark. This is a huge task for email marketers to manage on their own, so we delved into billions of our customers’ emails to develop benchmarks by day and industry.
How to measure the average open rate of emails
If you would like to measure your own average open rate of emails in order to compare with your industry’s average, it’s quite simple: Your email service provider should allow you to see your campaign metrics.
Does it really matter?
Calculating your own average email open rate and then comparing it to your industry’s average is a great way to measure the quality of your campaign.
More specifically, it will elucidate the effectiveness of the aspects of the campaign that are directly correlated with email opens.
Have an eye-catching subject line.
Your subject line is going to be your first impression on the reader, so you want to both pique the reader’s curiosity and assume a tone that matches your target audience.
You also want to make sure that your subject line is personalized. People are more likely to click on emails if they feel are directly addressing them.
Timing is everything.
Sending out your emails at random times means you’re likely going to get random results. Instead, you need to pinpoint certain times of the day that your audience is likely to be at their computer or device, checking their inbox.
This particular time is going to depend entirely on your target audience.
Don’t get caught by the spam filter.
As with most technologies, spam filters are useful but hardly perfect. They often unintentionally rope in emails that aren’t spam, so you’ll want to avoid including anything in your emails that could be confused with spam.
What now?
With the knowledge of the average open rate for emails at your disposal, you can now compare it with your own open rate. This way, you’ll have a great marker for how much your email campaign needs to improve.
If you’re unsatisfied by your average open rate, there are ways to improve it that go beyond subject lines and timing. Having an exceptional open rate is necessary for a campaign because, no matter how good the email’s content is, users will never know if they don’t open it.