Email Open Rates Explained

If you’ve been toying with the idea of adopting email marketing automation for your business, there is no better time to do it. With technology developing more and more, you have more tools at your disposal to obtain valuable insights into the success of your email newsletter. With database management tools like Swift Digital’s, you’ll be able to interpret the data and strategist accordingly.

One of the most useful types of data is that which shows your email open rates. Put simply, each email you send out to your list is tracked. With email open rates data, you’ll be able to obtain a number that represents the percentage of people who were enticed by your subject line and clicked open.

What’s difficult, though, is interpreting this single statistic. It can be hard to know where your number compares with other businesses in your industry, and whether the data on your dashboard is impressive or not. Here, we go through the most important things to look for regarding your email open rate so you’ll be able to approach the data with information on your side.

In fact, across all industries, the average email open rate sits at about 25%. This might seem quite low but bear in mind that your recipients’ inboxes are flooded with marketing emails on a daily basis, and you just might not be able to secure the opportunity to catch their attention.

Some industries can even experience open rates near 10% of the total number of subscribers.

The statistics show that the best subject lines are more descriptive than they are creative. That’s because in the midst of their crowded inbox, your reader wants a sharp and concise reason to click. If they don’t see what they want straight away, the chance is they’ll move right on.

If your business communications involve a couple of different groups, it doesn’t make sense to send them one mass email. Using database software like Swift Digital’s means you’ll be able to create sub-groups for your main marketing list, and send a separate piece of communication to each one. Each email will have more appropriate content, an audience-specific tone and will attract many more people to open it.

These days, a huge proportion of people are reading their emails on devices that aren’t their desktop or laptop computers. It’s important, therefore, that you design your emails accordingly – using a marketing automation platform – to get the open rates up on portable devices.

The most important thing to remember is that your audience might respond amazingly to one thing, while another strategy falls short in their eyes. Your email marketing platform will allow you to conduct A/B tests on each email. Send one email with subject line A to a small segment of your list, then send one with subject line B to another little subset. Once you have found out which subject line – A or B – performs best with these experimental groups, send the winning email out to your wider list. It’s the surest way to enhance your open rates and tailor your email to audience base.