Good Email Open Rates: Key Things to Know

Email Marketing
Good Email Open Rates: Key Things to Know
Article by Ivana Ivanova
Last Updated: July 17, 2024

Email open rate refers to the percentage of people who open an email after it has been sent. Measuring your email open rate allows you to gauge the performance of your email marketing campaigns and see how many people are engaging with your emails, helping you improve your marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to learn about email open rates, why they’re a crucial metric, and the average open rates for email marketing by industry.

Key Takeaways

  • The average email open rate is around 35%.
  • Childcare services have the highest open rate for emails in 2024 — 51.19%.
  • The lowest open rate for emails is in the technology services industry — 24.28%.
  • Sending emails at the right time and personalizing them are the two most important factors to consider.

What Are the Average Open Rates for Email Marketing?

MailChimp says a good email open rate should be around 35%. Email marketing average open rates vary by industry or device, but most fields see around 20% of recipients opening emails from unfamiliar senders.

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Average Email Open Rates by Industry

To answer the question of what is a good open rate for email marketing, Constant Contact conducts monthly data gathering from all their emails. These are the average email open rates by industry in 2024:

  • Administrative & Business Support Services: 32.07%
  • Child Care Services: 51.19%
  • Consulting Services: 32.31%
  • Dining and Food Services: 35.05%
  • Education: 41.56%
  • Faith-Based Organizations: 42.74%
  • Family and Social Services: 43.70%
  • Financial Services: 26.46%
  • Health and Wellness: 41.20%
  • Home & Building Services: 41.21%
  • Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers: 42.63%
  • Legal Services: 36.96%
  • Manufacturing and Distribution: 32.53%
  • Nonprofit Membership Organizations: 43.07%
  • Nonprofit Services: 42.08%
  • Personal Care Services: 39.49%
  • Real Estate: 36%
  • Recreation, Sports & Entertainment: 42.15%
  • Repair and Maintenance: 28.95%
  • Retail: 35.65%
  • Technology Services: 24.28%
  • Transportation Services: 34.85%
  • Travel & Tourism: 40.02%

Why Are Email Open Rates Important?

Tracking and calculating this metric regularly is crucial to your business’s success. Here are a few reasons why:

  • It tells you who is actively looking at your emails, allowing you to clean out the list and focus more on those people who are actually interested in your offers.
  • A good open rate for email tells you whether your email advertisement campaign works.
  • It can show you which emails your subscribers like, allowing you to focus your efforts on making similar ones.
  • With a good email open rate, you get more insights into your customers’ behavior. You learn when they open their emails, how much time they spend reading them, what content they interact most with, and more — all allowing you to schedule your emails and create relevant content that will bring in more customers.

Calculate your email open rate by dividing the number of recipients who have opened your email by the total number of emails sent:

Number of Opens / Total Number of Recipients * 100%

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7 Factors That Affect the Email Open Rate

What is a good open rate for an email campaign? To find the answer, consider these factors before starting your email campaign to ensure its success:

  1. Subject Line: This is an email's first and most essential element. It should be short and specific, with a compelling call-to-action (CTA) enticing the reader to act immediately.
  2. Content: Keeping your emails brief and relevant is one way to increase open rates. Tedious or lengthy emails will likely be ignored.
  3. Personalization: Emailing people by name when you can help personalize your message increases open rates.
  4. Length of Email: Emails with fewer words are usually easier to read and are less likely to be ignored.
  5. Email List Quality: An email marketing service like Mailchimp lets you track the number of subscribers who are opening your emails and how many times they click on them. If your email list isn't delivering high-quality subscribers, then it might not make sense to spend time improving your open rate; in this case, think about getting a new email list for marketing and then check if it provides a good email open rate.
  6. Email Frequency: Emails sent infrequently will generally receive better responses than those sent daily or weekly.
  7. Email Design: Don't underestimate the importance of creating an eye-catching design. With so many emails being sent every day, it's easy for you to get lost in someone's inbox without being noticed if it doesn't have an appealing look about it. Go online and check out some current email design inspirations and adjust them to your brand voice.

How To Increase Email Open Rates: 8 Simple Steps

If your email marketing efforts aren't generating the open rate you hoped for, there are some easy ways to fix that. These email marketing tips will help increase your email open rates:

  1. Send Emails at the Right Time
  2. Personalize Your Emails 
  3. Include Relevant Images 
  4. Implement Permission-Based Email Marketing 
  5. Try to Use Emojis in the Subject Line 
  6. Develop Email Automation Campaigns 
  7. Don't Spam 
  8. Consider Paying for Advertising

1. Send Emails at the Right Time

According to their report, HubSpot recommends sending emails between 9-10 AM or 5-6 PM. Since most people have regular day jobs, it's best not to send emails during their typical work hours.

2. Personalize Your Emails

Whether through an autoresponder or just on the spot, personalizing emails can make them seem more relevant to recipients and improve their open rates.

For instance, maybe you have a different email marketing campaign geared toward other regions of the country. In this case, you may want to tweak the language or graphics depending on where the emails are sent. By doing this, recipients will feel like they're receiving targeted content, which could lead to higher open rates for your emails.

3. Include Relevant Images

Adding images helps engage readers and improves email open rates. These provide visual cues about what they're reading without having to read all the text.

One important note about using images is to always include alt text (alternative text) when attaching photos to emails. This ensures that recipients who may not see the images clearly can still understand the content.

4. Implement Permission-Based Email Marketing

A permission-based email marketing strategy means you will only send emails to those who have opted in rather than using a mass email blast. This way, you're not bombarding your subscribers and annoying them with irrelevant messages. You'll also be able to avoid spam filters since people are opting in on their own accord.

5. Try to Use Emojis in the Subject Line

One email marketing tip that might surprise you is adding emojis to the subject line. One report shows that adding emojis to your subject line, especially on holidays, increases email open rates. For instance, using a smile emoji in the subject lines appeals to positive emotions among those who see these emails.

6. Develop Email Automation Campaigns

Automating email campaigns helps manage time efficiently based on your needs, goals, and objectives. It's easier than ever to develop automated campaigns thanks to platforms like Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign. They offer drag-and-drop editors that allow marketers and entrepreneurs alike to create professional-looking emails quickly.

7. Don't Spam

Avoid spamming recipients. Sending too many emails in a short amount of time can decrease the likelihood that your emails will be opened or clicked on. On average, you should limit the number of emails you send to 10-20 per day and the best place to do that is in your opt-in box or autoresponder.

8. Consider Paying for Advertising

Email marketing tips are helpful, but if you're going for an even higher open rate, it might be worth considering paying for advertising. This means that you would pay someone else to reach out to potential customers on behalf of your company and bring new leads onto your email list.

Average Open Rates for Email Marketing Takeaways

An email open rate is a great metric you can use to measure the effectiveness of your email campaign. The open rate will tell you how many people opened the email and read it, which can indicate how interested they were in your offer or message.

The good news is that this is an ever-evolving field, meaning there are plenty of ways to improve your open rates and build trust with your audience.

You can use tools to follow the open rates of your emails, or if you feel that’s not an option, consider outsourcing the task to a professional email marketing agency. These pros will handle the nitty-gritty for you and help spread the word about your company in no time.

Learn all about email click-through rates next!

Email Marketing Open Rates FAQs

1. What's the difference between an open rate and a click-through rate?

An email open rate is the percentage of people who see a specific email and take some action, like opening the email. On the other hand, an email click-through rate is the percentage of people who see a specific email and then click on a link inside that email.

Open rates show general engagement, while click-through rates show that your emails are interesting enough that other people want to find out even more by clicking on a link within the email.

2. What is a good email open rate?

A good email open rate is typically around 35%. However, the average email open rate can vary depending on the industry or device used. For example, on average, religious organizations have the highest email opening rate of almost 43%, compared with technology services with a modest 24%.

3. How to track email open rates?

To track email open rates, use tracking pixel, a tiny invisible image provided by Google Analytics. When a user opens an email that contains this tracker, the image will download, and the email will be recorded as open.

Some email marketing tools, like Mailchimp and HubSpot, also allow you to track which specific recipients opened your email. Still, this tracking might require additional settings and is only suitable for some types of email marketing campaigns.

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