Email Open Rate

Email open rate is the percentage of subscribers who open a specific email out of your total number of subscribers. 

Many people look to their email open rate to determine how successful their email marketing strategy is and, while email open rate is important, no one metric should determine your strategy. Instead, you should consider multiple metrics and think about the goals you have for your email marketing as a tactic.

Similarly, you should not only judge your email open rate by your specific industry, you should also look at how your email open rates are improving (or not) over time. This will give you a better understanding of how often people look forward to your emails. You’ll also be able to determine what type of content is the most interesting to your specific audience.

In addition to the global issues that could affect your email open rates—are you sending the right content to the most interested segment? Are you sending too frequently? Not frequently enough?—you should also test your email subject lines and preheader text to determine your best open rate. 

Ultimately, ensuring that your brand follows best practices for email marketing and sending high-quality content to the right segments of subscribers will improve your email open rates more significantly over time—leading to a more engaged audience that’s invested in your brand—than spending inordinate amounts of time on your subject line which will only lead to an increased open rate for that one email send.

Check out how Morning Brew improved their email open rates in this exclusive interview: Email Open Rate Case Study