Average email open rates
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People often want to know what an average or good email open rate is, so they can gauge whether their own email marketing results are decent or not. You need some kind of public numbers or benchmarks to do that.
Now there are open rate figures out there. But you can't really compare them to your own. Here's why...
First, different marketers and vendors calculate open rates in different ways, as we discovered earlier. Who knows if your way of calculating them is the same as the way used in producing the public averages? Yours may be lower simply because you calculate the rate more conservatively.
Second, a good open rate for one type of email and address list may be a poor one for another. And the benchmark figures are based on a hotch potch of different lists and emails. Comparisons only make sense if you compare like with like.
An average open rate given out by a stats publisher for, say, "financial emails" might combine the email marketing results from banks, stockbroker firms, mortgage companies, financial advisers, accountancy firms, corporations and one-man consultancies.
Some might send daily six-line stock alerts, others a bi-monthly newsletter filled with tax advice. And who knows how they built their address lists. Some lists are better quality than others.
So that average says very little about what you might expect as a one-man financial consultant sending out a monthly pension advice newsletter to your clients.
Nevertheless, benchmark and average email open rates do have some benefits. They do allow you to follow email marketing trends, for example. This email marketing metrics article explains more on this subject and shows you where to find public email open rate data.
If you are going to do a comparison, then first try and find the published open rate source that best matches your email marketing.
If you send fashion emails, try and find an average based on emails from similar companies (many vendors break down published stats by industry - see the article above for appropriate links).
Then take the published average and consider the characteristics of your email marketing and email address list that might lower or raise your expectations, irrespective of how "good" you are at email marketing. Here are two examples:
1. How big is your address list? Larger lists tend to have lower open rates as it becomes difficult to please everybody (which is why it helps to break down lists into chunks of addresses sharing similar characteristics: so-called segmentation)
2. What kind of specific audience are you writing for? If your audience are extremely busy folk then expect lower open rates.
This process gives you some kind of figure to treat as average, notwithstanding all the ifs and buts outlined above. Then you can plan to meet and beat that average figure (who wants to be just average?).
Now if you have no time at all, pinned me against the wall and threatened to kill a kitten if I didn't spout a number, I'd tell you that the average reported open rate for a typical, reasonably targeted marketing email to an opt-in list is...
Around 25% (don't quote me though).
Lower for direct-response sales-type emails from retailers, higher if you're sending out information-based newsletters. Use that figure carefully!
Why so low? Partly an issue of measurement difficulties, partly the nature of email: it may come as a shock, but people probably aren't half as interested in your marketing mails as you'd like them to be.
Next: How to improve email open rates
1. Email open rates guide
2.
What do email open rates mean?
3.
How to use email open rates
4.
Average email open rates
(why yours are different)
5.
How to improve email open rates