A Breakdown of Email Open Rates by Industry

A Breakdown of Email Open Rates by Industry

Every email marketer should be aware of the importance of email open rates for the success of email campaigns. However, you may be wondering what a good open rate is for your industry. 

This article will give a breakdown of email open rates by industry, information on how open rates are tracked, and resources that can help improve open rates and engagement. Keep reading to learn more about open rates and how you can optimize your email marketing strategy. 

What Is a Good Email Open Rate?

Email opens are crucial to the success of an email marketing campaign. Your marketing emails can’t be effective if people don’t open them in the first place. If you’re looking for a good range to aim for with your email open rates, anything between 17-28%, excluding Apple MPP opens, is considered a good open rate. 

However, email open rates can vary quite a bit by industry. Companies in different industries will send email content unique to their needs. This leads to significant variance in how consumers interact with emails from different brands. 

What Is the Average Email Open Rate in 2022?

The average email marketing open rate across industries is 21.33%. For businesses in most industries, being at or above this percentage is a good sign that your marketing emails are performing well. 

An excellent way to optimize your email marketing campaigns for success is to track open rates and other important email marketing metrics. AudiencePoint’s email insight software can help by tracking valuable data from email campaigns while providing you with actionable ideas into how you can improve your email strategy.

How Is Email Open Rate Tracked?

The standard practice to track open rates in email marketing is by embedding a single-pixel image that is transparent and unique to each email sent. When someone opens your email, the single-pixel image will be loaded, and email analytics tools can track it as an email open. 

You may be worried about embedding an image in your emails and how that will affect your content. However, you don’t need to be concerned, because this image is transparent and won’t be visible to those who view your emails. You can create your content as usual with no extra effort required, since most analytics tools that track open rates embed this image automatically into each email.

Unfortunately, tracking email open rates can’t always be exact, due to flaws with this system, such as consumer privacy protection through Apple devices that will load pixels even if your email was never opened. 

How Apple MPP Affects Email Open Rate Tracking

One of the things that has affected how email opens are tracked is Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). Apple MPP causes emails sent to the mail app on Apple devices to be opened on Apple’s own proxy servers before landing in inboxes. 

While this is done to eliminate consumers receiving spam email content, it also affects how open rates are tracked, since that single-pixel image embedded in emails will be loaded when emails are opened on Apple proxy servers. 

Due to this and the fact that a large percentage of people use the mail app on Apple devices, open rates are being inflated when tracked through analytics tools. 

However, AudiencePoint is aware of this. Our email insight software can isolate Apple MPP opens from reporting to provide accurate metrics that are up to date with today’s standards. 

How Issues with Loading Images Can Affect Email Open Rate Tracking

At times, some recipients may have issues loading images within your emails. This can be due to problems on the recipient’s side, issues with the receiving domain, or design errors on the sender’s end. Whatever the cause, this leads to the single-pixel image that tracks open rates not being loaded correctly. This means the email is not tracked as opened, even though it was. 

The most common way that analytics tools work around this issue is tracking for link clicks or other types of interactions along with open rate. If someone clicks a link or interacts with your content in a way that can be tracked, you can still know that they opened the email, even if the single-pixel image doesn’t load. 

However, this only works if readers actually click a link or interact with your email content, so it isn’t always accurate. The best way to counteract this issue is to ensure your emails are engaging for subscribers and implement best practices for email content and design. 

AudiencePoint can help by providing insights into how you can better engage your audience by optimizing send times, segmenting your email list, and re-engaging inactive subscribers. Implementing all these aspects into your email strategy will ensure that your emails receive higher engagement and open rates. 

A Breakdown of Email Open Rates by Industry

Email open rates can have a significant amount of variance by industry. This means that when you are setting goals for your email campaigns, you should be accounting for the average open rate in your industry. Knowing your industry’s open rate standards will give you a realistic estimate of what you can achieve with your own email content. 

Email Open Rates by Industry

The average email open rates across major industries, excluding Apple MPP opens, are:

• Agriculture: 23.31%
• Arts: 26.27%
• Beauty/personal care: 16.65%
• E-commerce: 15.68%
• Electronics: 19.29%
• Government: 28.77%
• Health: 21.48%
• Legal: 22%
• Marketing: 17.38%
• Real estate: 19.17%
• Restaurant: 19.77%
• Retail: 18.39%
• Sports: 24.57%
• Travel: 20.44%

As you can see, the percentages for open rates across these industries vary significantly, with the lowest being e-commerce at 15.68%, and the highest being government at 28.77%. 

Why Do Email Open Rates Vary By Industry?

These varying open rates make sense due to the type of content that different types of businesses and organizations will send. For example, many e-commerce businesses tend to send more promotional and sales-based content, which can lead to lower average open rates across the industry. 

On the other hand, government organizations usually send emails containing highly relevant content to the recipient. When people receive an email from a government organization, it is something they will likely need to open and interact with to some extent. This leads to higher open rates and other engagement metrics. 

Even though an industry like e-commerce may have a lower average open rate, it doesn’t mean you have to settle for lower numbers when setting your email marketing goals. Many businesses don’t implement email marketing best practices or invest in tools that can help. So it’s likely you can achieve much better results. 

Using an email insight software like AudiencePoint can have a significant benefit on the results of your email marketing campaigns to help you outperform your competitors. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help You with Your Email Marketing Needs

AudiencePoint has three easy-to-implement tools that can help you optimize your email marketing campaigns. These tools are Send Time Optimization and ListFit. Each one takes into account email metrics and how your subscribers interact with email content to give you actionable insights on how you can improve your email marketing efforts. 

Send Time Optimization

Send time optimization plays a crucial role in email marketing success. As AudiencePoint picks up on trends in how subscribers engage with email content, specific send times can be recommended to send emails and engage subscribers at the right moment. 

Sending emails when subscribers are most likely to check their inboxes or when they’re most likely to convert is a great way to boost email engagement. It raises your chances that you will reach your readers when they are most interested and willing to take action. 

ListFit

ListFit is a tool that analyzes your email list and subscriber activity. By gathering data on subscriber activity, you can better understand consumers’ wants, needs, and interests. ListFit will also help you identify subscribers who have become inactive, so you can re-engage them. 

Low open rates due to inactive subscribers can affect the success of your marketing emails, since it can lead to higher bounce rates and other negative issues. This makes it essential to re-engage inactive subscribers or identify invalid email addresses to clean up your email list. 

Additionally, gathering data about email subscriber activity helps you get a better idea of what subscribers are most interested in, so you can send accurately segmented content to subscribers and for re-engagement email campaigns. 

Get Started with AudiencePoint

If AudiencePoint sounds like it would be beneficial for your business, contact us today to learn more about how we can help improve your email marketing campaigns. We’d love to answer any questions you may have.