Email Open Rate: What It Is, How to Calculate It & Fix Low Rates

No matter how good your email campaigns are, they wouldn’t do you any good if your audience is not open them. Sending an email is one thing, but making sure that they open it is another thing. Now, the question arises, how will you know whether your audience is opening your email or not? One of the important metrics that can help you in this aspect is email open rate. Email open rate is based on a specific subscriber list and is one of the main indicators of success. If your email open rate is low, then very few people are opening your emails, and there might be something off about your email strategy.

Let us explore the fundamentals of email performance, what is a good email open rate, and what are the factors that impact your email open rate. Let us see how you can resolve your low open rate and how you can make your email campaigns perfect-

Fundamentals of Email Performance

Let us start with something very basic: how can you understand the email performance strategy in general? You already know something about email open rate, but let us see a few other important factors:

• Email Open Rate: The rate at which your audience opens your email.
• Click-through Rate (CTR): The rate at which your users select and follow at least one link in your email.
• Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR): The overall percentage of users who open your email and follow through.
• Unsubscribe Rate (UR): The rate at which your recipients unsubscribe.

The email benchmarks for such rates change by email type and industry.

Why Are Email Open Rates Significant?

Email open rates are a critical metric in email marketing because they tell you about the exact performance of your email campaign. For example, email open rates will let you know:

• If your email has reached the inbox of your recipient.
• Whether you have identified the right segment.
• Whether the subject line of your email was compelling.
• Is your preheader text engaging enough?

Now that we have a clear idea regarding why email open rates are significant, let us understand what a good email open rate is.

What Is a Good Email Open Rate?

Open rates greatly depend on the kind of email you are sending. For example, the majority of email open rates have an 80-85% average open rate. On the other hand, the majority of marketing emails fall between 80-85%.

The open rate of transaction emails tends to be higher because it is the kind of information that people want to repeatedly visit or view immediately. These can be receipts for purchases or password resets. So, it is not uncommon to see open rates in higher ranges.

Email marketing is more difficult, and as experts suggest, it is important to keep marketing and transactional emails separate. In this way, senders can prevent lower rates of engagement from hampering your triggered messages. An email rate of 20-25% is not a bad number either. But let us look at some of the qualities that we can expect to see in a good email open rate:

Your open rate is constantly improving and is steady. Check your open rates over a period of time, such as for a quarter or a year. Assess your open rate to assess whether your email strategy is healthy.

The open rate equals the average for distinct devices. The open rates can change as per whether the subscriber can open the email on their laptop or mobile devices. Take a deeper look at the indicators to see whether they meet the benchmarks.

Your open rate is equal to or greater than the industry average. Though every industry is different, having an open rate above, equal to, or very close to the industry average showcases that you are in pace with your competitors.

What Are the Factors That Impact Your Open Rate?

Now that we have a clear idea of what a good open rate is, let us explore a few factors that impact it:

1. Clean Mailing List: Ensuring that your mailing lists are significant, make sure that email addresses are not just spam traps and are relevant. It is important to verify your emails and ascertain that they meet the standards before you send them.
   
   
2. Reputation: The reputation of the sender is a top factor that determines whether your message is landing on the inbox of your email recipient or not. After all, if your message is not being delivered, the subscriber is unlikely to open it. Assess your bounce rate to find out whether your emails are being delivered or not. Having said that, you can adopt email best practices that can improve your reputation as a sender.
   
   
3. Brand Recognition: Does your audience have a clear idea of who you are and what your brand stands for? Have they received enough emails from you recently to understand who you are? Only sending emails to those who have subscribed and leveraging techniques like BIMI will allow you to drive maximum open rates.
   
   
4. Preheader and Subject Line: Readers will not open your message if your subject line is not relevant, well-crafted, or convincing. Furthermore, you must also avoid clickbait subject lines, so you do not appear like a spammer and comply with CAN-SPAM Act guidelines. Perform A/B testing of your preheaders and subject lines to find out what is right for your subscribers.
   
   
5. Accessibility: It is important to ensure that the subscribers not only receive an email but also receive it. When you are designing your subject lines and content marketing, focus on screen readers to enhance open rates and accessibility.

How Can You Fix a Low Open Rate?

Most of the time low open rate arises if you are not following email best practices. If you are consistently getting a low open rate, it is advisable to conduct a detailed audit on email deliverability. In this audit, you will find out what is working and what is not, and will enable you to recognize potential threats and issues.

Low open rates also happen when your email lists are of low quality. If you have not updated your email list in a while or if you have built it through shady means, you will likely find that your subscribers are just not interested in opening your email.

Furthermore, you can also delete subscribers who have not engaged with your emails in a while. As a thumb rule, look for the subscribers who have not opened your monthly newsletter in the last three months. You can expect the subscribers to unsubscribe themselves, but people can forget about unsubscribing or stop using that email address completely.

Also, consider the content you are putting in your email. Is it relevant? Are you using customization tokens in your email body and subject?

Little changes like these can make a significant difference in improving your email open rate. Even as small a customization as “Hi Jason, I think our new product catalogue might interest you” will go a long way than a generic “Hi, you will be surprised to see the products we have launched.”

How Do You Calculate Email OR, CTR, and CTOR?

Let us divide an email into three categories: Opened, Delivered, and Clicked. Calculating Open Rate is extremely simple; it is just the number of people who have opened the email compared to the total number of emails delivered. The simple formula is given as follows:

1. OR: #Opened/Delivered

Both Click-to-open rate and click-through rate calculate the number of people who click on an email link that they have opened. The only difference is that CTOR is compared to the total number of people who have opened the email, and CTR is compared to the total number of emails that have been delivered.

2. CTOR= #Clicked/#Opened

3. CTR= #Clicked/#Delivered

Endnote

It can be frustrating to see your email open rate in the low ranges, but it is important to not feel demotivated. As the above blog suggests, it is a fixable problem. You can start by conducting a thorough audit of your email deliverability. Check whether you are creating the right content for the right audience. Furthermore, consistently update your email lists and remove the ones that have not interacted with your email in the last 3 months. You can also implement email best practices and make sure that you align with CAN-SPAM Act guidelines to improve your overall reputation. Pinpointing the exact problems and implementing the right solutions will help you see consistent improvements to your email open rate metrics.