You’re sending your audience beautifully designed, highly personalized, and carefully crafted emails. But do you know if they’re being read or not? If not, you need to understand the concept of open rate in email marketing.
Open rate refers to the percentage of email subscribers who open your emails. It's a key metric for measuring the efficacy of your email campaigns.
You can increase engagement and drive conversions by monitoring and optimizing your open rate. In this blog post, we’ll talk about open rates and provide practical tips to boost your email open rates effectively.
What is open rate?
Let’s understand the open rate in more detail. In email marketing, the open rate is one of the most important metrics you need to look at. Why? Because if your emails never get opened, they never get read.
To calculate the open rate, you divide the number of emails opened by the number of emails delivered to your subscribers, excluding bounced emails. If you sent 10 emails without bounces and four were opened, your open rate is 4/10 X 100, which is 40%.
Open rate is similar to a read receipt, except for a couple of things. On one hand, you won’t know exactly when your email was opened. On the other, this metric is much more accurate than email read receipts.
How can I see open rate?
You can easily see the open rate of your email marketing campaign in the tracking report or metric section of your email marketing platform or mail merge tool.
This is how YAMM, the best mail merge add-on for Gmail, displays the open rate of your email campaign in its tracking report. YAMM lets you see and track key email marketing metrics from your Google Sheets.
What is a good open rate for email marketing?
There’s no universal answer to this question. Open rates vary widely across industries, markets, products, and niches. The only way to determine if your open rates are good is to compare them to your industry and product benchmarks. Check some average email open rates classified by industry.
To some extent, a higher open rate indicates that your emails are capturing the attention of your subscribers. A lower open rate may suggest a need for improvement in your content or targeting.
However, it’s important to note that the overall open rate is not critical for the success of an email marketing campaign. This is because, ultimately, what matters is how many of your customers engage and how many finally convert from those that open your emails. That’s the number that matters the most for a business's bottom line.
How to increase open rate in email marketing
Get rid of hard bounces
A hard bounce is an email delivery failure when an email is permanently undeliverable to the intended recipient. This happens when an email is sent to an invalid or non-existent email address.
There could be a few reasons for hard bounces. A customer mistyping their email address could result in a hard bounce. Further, if your recipient's email server blocks emails from a particular email or server, that could result in non-delivery, too.
To tackle hard bounces, you should regularly clean your email list by removing invalid or inactive addresses. Another way is to use an email verification tool that automatically validates and updates your subscriber list. If all else fails, pay attention to bounce notifications and manually remove bounced email addresses.
Make sure emails are mobile-responsive
Another thing you can do to increase your open rates is to ensure that your emails are mobile-responsive. The majority of users today consume online content through mobile, so there’s just no getting around catering to these users.
You risk losing engagement if your emails aren’t optimized for mobile viewing. Once a user experiences a non-mobile-friendly email, they may be discouraged from opening subsequent emails.
When crafting your emails, use mobile-responsive email templates or design them to adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes. You should also keep concise subject lines and preheader text that display fully on mobile devices. Keep your content scannable and use clear headings and bullet points in the main body text.
Segment your email list
Segmenting your email list can be an effective way to increase your open rates. You can divide your subscribers according to interests, preferences, online behaviors, or demographics. You can deliver more relevant and personalized content when you divide your subscribers into smaller, targeted segments.
Further, segmentation enhances user engagement as recipients feel more connected to the content. When you can connect with your audience and show them that you understand their preferences, the likelihood of them opening and engaging with your emails increases!
See open rates in your Google Sheets with YAMM!
So, now you know what open rate is in email marketing, how you can see it, and the tiny changes you can make to increase it. The best thing you can do for your email campaigns is to partner with a tool that makes it easy to track metrics. This is because what gets measured gets mastered!
Like the sound of that? Try YAMM. YAMM is a powerful Google add-on that makes sending mass marketing emails a breeze! The most incredible thing is that YAMM lets you track key email campaign metrics, like open rates, delivery rates, response rates, etc., right from your Google Sheets. Sound good? Try out YAMM for your next email marketing campaign!