Open Rate is the percentage of emails in an email campaign that are opened by users. This metric is one of the fundamental indicators when analyzing the effectiveness of email campaigns. It allows you to evaluate reader engagement and understand how successful the email was. Based on the Open Rate, a company can make decisions to optimize its email marketing.
Open Rate can be overall or unique. The overall rate takes into account any email opens, regardless of how many times a single user performs this action. The unique rate only takes into account one open per user. To calculate the Open Rate, you need to take the number of opened emails and divide it by the number of sent emails, and then multiply the resulting figure by 100%. All email marketing services calculate this rate by default and usually use unique values.
In email marketing, there are no clear criteria for what Open Rate should be considered normal because many different factors influence the rate. However, marketers consider a good rate to be around 20%. If fewer than 10% of your emails are opened, this indicates problems with your email campaign that require a solution. A low Open Rate may have several causes.
- An outdated email list. If you do not regularly update and clean your list, its relevance will quickly decrease. The list may contain deleted mailboxes, addresses with errors, or users who have forgotten their password or simply unsubscribed from the campaign. The presence of such addresses in the list significantly affects the Open Rate, and because of them, you may mistakenly assume that the problem is with the content.
- Lack of segmentation. When you populate your list for a campaign, it is desirable to receive at least some minimal information about the user, in addition to the email address. For example, name, gender, or date of birth. The collected user data can be used to segment the list. This will make the campaign more precise and useful to readers.
- Poorly chosen send time. The percentage of opened emails varies significantly depending on the day of the week and time of sending. For example, if you send emails on Friday evenings or on weekends, there is no point in expecting a high Open Rate. Test how your email Open Rate changes depending on the day of the week and find the optimal send time.
- Uninteresting email subject. No matter how well-crafted an email is, it will not be opened if the subject is boring. Stand out in the user's mailbox by personalizing the subject, adding emojis, and using other techniques.
- Mistaken frequency of campaigns. To read a campaign, users should receive it regularly. At the same time, you should not annoy your audience with a large number of emails, as this will reduce the value of the campaign. Find an acceptable number of campaigns per week, such as two sends on Mondays and Thursdays.
