What Is a Good Open Rate for Email Marketing?

Your subscribers must open your emails to interact with your content, making open rate one of the key benchmarks to measure the success of email marketing campaigns. This article will outline why email marketing is important, good open rates for email engagement, and other essential email marketing benchmarks. 

Why Is Email Marketing so Important?

Email marketing creates a valuable connection between customers and brands. When someone signs up for a brand’s email list, they typically are already aware of the brand or may have made a recent purchase. This makes email a great option to continue connecting with an audience that is already interested in what you offer.

How Does Email Marketing Help Brands?

Email marketing has several benefits for brands. Some of the best benefits of email marketing for brands are:

• Consumer awareness: Sending out regular email content will help your subscribers get to know your brand better. Marketing emails can help educate consumers about how your products can help them and make them aware of any upcoming company updates or new product launches. 
• Engagement: Marketing emails keep your email subscribers engaged with your brand. Engagement makes subscribers feel involved and maintains top-of-mind awareness, so your brand is one of the first options that pop into their minds when they need to make a purchase. 
• Trust: Email content builds consumer trust and projects your company as a knowledgeable authority in your industry. People who find value in your content are more likely to trust your brand’s recommendations and follow a call to action.
• Loyalty: Marketing emails will increase consumer loyalty. When someone makes a purchase and signs up for your email list, it keeps them in touch with your brand. Staying in touch with past customers will help encourage repeat purchases or new product sales. 
• High ROI: Email marketing is the highest ROI digital marketing strategy, with an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. The effectiveness of email marketing is due to the connection created with email subscribers, which leads to brand familiarity. Customers who are familiar with your brand will be more receptive to email promotions.

All these benefits make email marketing a valuable asset for businesses in any industry. Tracking specific email marketing metrics and aiming to hit benchmarks are great ways to optimize email campaigns. 

What Is a Good Email Open Rate?

The average email open rate across industries is 21.33% (without Apple MPP opens.) Therefore, a good open rate for businesses in most industries is anything above this number.

If you have an above-average open rate, it is a sign that your email subscribers are consistently engaging with your email content and that your emails are performing better than your competitors’ emails. It is generally best to measure the performances of your emails against industry averages vs. overall averages, as some industries have higher or lower average open rates. 

How to Increase Email Open Rate?

The best ways to increase email marketing open rate are:

1. Re-engage inactive subscribers: If you see drops in open rate, re-engaging inactive subscribers is a great way to get back on track. ListFit from AudiencePoint can help you identify subscribers who are still active within our data pool who are a part of your inactive file, so you can create re-engagement content that is specific to their needs. 
2. Subject lines: Your subject line is a determining factor in whether someone decides to open your email. Emphasizing your emails’ value and key phrases relevant to your subscribers’ needs will help you create subject lines that encourage email opens.
3. Optimize send times: A powerful strategy to increase open rate is reaching your email subscribers at the right time. Send time optimization through AudiencePoint can help with this by collecting data about email subscriber activity to understand when your subscribers are most likely to check their inboxes. 
4. Email segmentation: Sending targeted emails to segmented groups of your email list is a great way to get high open rates. AudiencePoint’s email insight software provides valuable information about your email subscribers, so you can create engaging content based on their unique needs. 

Improving these aspects of your emails, along with help from actionable insights through AudiencePoint, will help you boost open rates and engagement on your emails. 

What Are The Effects of Apple MPP on Open Rate?

Apple’s new mail privacy protection (MPP) has impacted the open rate metric when it is tracked in email analytics tools. Apple MPP causes emails sent to the mail app on Apple devices to be opened on Apple proxy servers before landing in inboxes, which inflates open rate numbers. 

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

What Are Other Email Marketing Benchmarks Businesses Should Track?

Along with open rate, there are other essential email benchmarks your business should track. The most important email benchmarks for businesses to track are:

• Click rate: Click rate in email marketing is the percentage of recipients that click a link in an email. The average email click rate is 2.62%, so aiming for a click rate at or above the average is a good benchmark for marketing emails.
• Conversion rate: Email marketing conversion rate is the percentage of recipients that take a targeted action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a subscription, or filling out a form. A 2-5% conversion rate is a good benchmark for email marketing.
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR): Click-to-open rate is the percentage of link clicks out of the number of people who opened an email. A good benchmark for click-to-open rate is between 10-15%. 
• Bounce rate: Email marketing bounce rate is the percentage of emails bounced (not accepted by the receiving domain) out of the total number of emails sent. A good benchmark for bounce rate is 2% or less.

Aiming to have your email statistics within these benchmarks will make your emails more successful.

Improve Your Email Open Rates With AudiencePoint

AudiencePoint’s email insight software provides a streamlined solution that tracks and outlines valuable information in an easily understandable way. Actionable data provided by AudiencePoint helps take the guesswork out of email marketing.

AudiencePoint will help you optimize send times, target your subscribers’ specific needs, and re-engage inactive subscribers on your email list. Contact us today for more information about how AudiencePoint can help your company get the highest ROI out of email marketing.