Healthy Opens for Wealthy Email Campaign [Infographic]
Email open rates are important measures of engagement with and by an organization (e.g., a business). However, this is not a metric in itself; it merely indicates how often someone has opened your email message. The true engagement value is given by the amount of people who have taken the actions you desired them to take, such as signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase. In business, this is called an “activation rate”.
There are several problems with email open rates. One is that they do not measure engagement. For example, the USA has more people in its population than any other country and its per capita spam rate is still below the global average. Yet, US citizens are said to have one of the lowest “email open rates”. When you consider this and the fact that so many Americans still get their email messages on a mobile device rather than a desktop or laptop computer (with almost no chance of moving their inbox to an attachment), it’s clear that email open rates cannot be relied upon as indicators of engagement or retention.
Another problem is that open rates are not even “real” numbers. An email address is either delivered, read, or acted on (open) for a certain period of time. If that period is shorter than the desired period of engagement, it does not count as a “reach”. In fact, this leads to skewed email open rates because most people will only count their own emails as open.
What is an email open rate?
A good email open rate means getting your emails opened and clicked on. Ideally, it should be above 40%. Why is this the most important metric for any email marketing campaign? Most people get 10 or less emails a day, and only a small percentage of those get opened. If only 1% of your emails are opened, you’re missing out on a potential 10% to 20% of your audience.
Email open rates have become a critical measure of success. A recent study by Experian shows that the average open rate for B2B marketing emails is 21%. But some industries routinely report much higher rates.
Experian’s data reveals the top 10 industries with open rates ranging from 53% to more than 80%.
That’s why it’s important to track open rates for your emails and figure out ways you can increase them. In this infographic post from Span Global Services, We’ll look at the factors and the best practices for increasing email open rates.
