Have you ever wondered how you can tell if your email marketing campaign delivers the results it should? Email marketing is one of the oldest marketing techniques used by brands of all shapes and sizes in nearly every industry.
As such, email performance can hugely affect the marketing success and growth of any business or organization.
That said, one of the easiest ways to determine whether your efforts and resources invested in email marketing are worth it is by comparing your email marketing performance indicators against others.
While there isn’t always a sure way to know how you are doing or how you can improve, benchmarking data can really give you a reference for your performance. You will know you are on the safe side if your email permanence metrics beat the industry averages.
If you are wondering how your email results compare to those in your industry, this article is for you. Read on to find everything you need to know about email marketing open rates and how you can improve your email performance.
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What is open rate in email marketing?
Many email marketers swear that email open rates are one of the best ways to tell if your email marketing strategy is working. But what are these rates?
At its core, the open rate refers to the percentage of your total subscribers who open the emails you send them. The open rates can vary significantly depending on the subject line and its relevance to your subscribers.
If you have higher open rates, it means that your subject lines resonate with your audience, and the reverse is true.
When benchmarking your email performance indicators, you want to know whether your open rate is higher than the industry average and lies somewhere a little behind the pack. Whatever the result you get, you will always find it possible to improve your strategy.
That said, the overall average email open rate across all industries and locations is 19.66% ± 2. The statistic is based on 2019 data from five well-known benchmarking platforms: Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, Constant Contact, and HubSpot.
Important email marketing performance metrics
Regarding email marketing, apart from benchmarking open rates, you need to understand other terminology related to email marketing. That said, you can get a well-rounded picture of your email marketing strategy if at all you get to understand the following.
Bounce rate
Focusing on email deliverability, bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent that couldn’t be successfully delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox.
Bounce rate can be divided into two: hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces occur because you’re sending an email to an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, while soft bounces usually mean that your recipient is temporary;y unavailable.
Click-through rate
As the name suggests, this is the percentage of recipients who click on one of the links in an email. Unlike open rate, this means that your audience was pleased by whatever is in the email and opted to click it to get the products or services.
Unique open rate
Far from the average email open rate, unique open rate refers to the percentage of unique audiences that have opened your email.
Although you can track and benchmark all your email performance indicators, it doesn’t necessarily follow what you should. All in all, whatever result you get, taking small bold steps can help you improve your marketing technique and avoid the risk of overwhelming yourself.
How to improve email open rates
Whether your open rates are way above or fall a little behind the industry average, you will always find it possible to achieve incremental improvements. If your open rates are lower than averages, it means that you have more room to improve your email marketing.
Here are things you can do to improve your email marketing strategy:
It’s all about the headline
The subject line (also headline) is the most essential part of an email, and your target audience is more likely to open an email whose headline resonates with them. That’s why you should make your headlines as effective as possible. After all, headlines are all your subscribers see when deciding whether to open an email or not.
Basically, when creating email headlines, you need to make sure that they clearly describe what is inside the email campaign. So, how do you make your subject lines catchy?
- Use short and sweet headlines – Shorter is always better when it comes to email headlines. It is recommended to use headlines with up to 60 characters.
- Personalization – Personalizing your headlines can boost open rates by 50%. Unfortunately, only 2% of marketing emails are personalized. The idea behind personalization is to tailor the email to a specific person and make the reader feel that you already know their wants.
- Be descriptive – No matter your industry, it is always possible to use a direct and descriptive headline rather than a trendy one. Subscribers will most likely open an email whose subject looks more beneficial than trendy.
When creating headlines for your marketing emails, you want to personalize them so that your subscribers find a value that will make them open the emails.
Depending on your industry, you can play around with emojis, humor, shock, and vanity, while avoiding anything that may look spammy. A recent study showed that emoji could increase open rates by 56%.
Clean up your list
The last thing any email marketer would want is bounces, whether hard or soft. That’s why you need to use the best practice to keep your lists clean.
Considering that email deliverability can drastically lower your open rate, cleaning your lists can help improve your open rate. Thankfully, it is easy to clean up your lists.
To ensure you are exclusively sending to engaged subscribers, all you need is to monitor emails, identify unengaged subscribers, and uproot them.
Cleaning up your lists (only sending to active subscribers) will also help you save on sending costs, improve email reputation, and get more valuable data.
Personalize the name
Another way to improve and maintain high email open rates is by sending relevant, personalized, and beneficial email campaigns and product update emails.
Indeed, personalizing subjects or email content can boost open rates by approximately 26%.
Personalizing can include things like adding the recipient’s name, mentioning their company, mentioning someone they know, mentioning previous purchases, or even referring to a tidbit about them, depending on your industry.
According to Experian, personalizing emails can generate up to 6x higher transactions.
Don’t Spam
If you want people to open your emails, you must avoid words or anything that presents you as a spammer. The idea is to get past the sophisticated spam filters, which means you have to learn how email spam filters work.
An easy way to bypass spam filters is by choosing and including relevant words on your email’s subject. Otherwise, your message will trigger spam filters, causing your marketing emails to skip recipients’ inboxes and land into their spam box.
Notably, you recipients can also mark your emails as spam based on your email address and subject line.
Generally, you will be safe if you send your campaign at reasonable time frames, say once a week or once per month, and make sure you send to subscribers through a verified address and from a good IP.
Remember not to use salesy words excessively, as most of them can trigger spam filters. It is also advisable to include an easy way for subscribers to opt out.
Time your email right
Timing is paramount in almost everything. In your campaign, you want to figure out the perfect time to send emails. In most cases, finding the perfect time (or perfect timeframes) requires several A/B tests.
MailChimp’s benchmarking data shows that sending emails on weekdays is more effective. On the same, Campaign Monitor shows that subscribers are more likely to open marketing emails sent on Tuesday, but this depends on your industry.
The time of the day when you send emails can also break or make your campaigns. Generally, most office workers check their emails at around 10 am.
Segment your subscribers
Segmentation is another useful strategy to improve your email open rates. This is because many people open emails they think are relevant to them.
That said, before you start sending emails, think about your audience and the kind of content they will find relevant and useful to them. According to MailChimp statistics, segmenting email campaigns leads to a 100% higher conversion rate.
Well, to ensure that you are sending the right content to the right audience, you can use subscriber location, interests, and activity to segment your campaigns.
Personalize with “I” and “You”
When sending emails to your subscribers, it is also advisable that you use clear and consistent “from” contact information. That way, your recipients can quickly tell that the email they are getting is from a trusted source, not a scammer or random sender.
The idea is to make your campaign effective by writing as though you were speaking to an individual person rather than a group. After all, all your subscribers receive your mail as individuals.
Build anticipation for your email
Building anticipation for your emails is one of the simplest things you can do to boost your open rates. You just want to find a way to increase your subscribers’ curiosity while increasing open and click-through rates. But, how?
Maintain consistency, and every time you send an email, end with a promise that you will fulfill in the next email.
Don’t forget humor
Humor has a way of making a strong and instant connection with people. That said, any entertaining content will most certainly stick in people’s minds. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a comedian to share humorous emails.
Simple things like using emojis may be more sensational than you can imagine. They create a good sense of humor for the readers of your emails. Also, incorporate some nice colors that will improve the display of your content.
Optimize for mobile
Most people prefer checking their emails via mobile phone. Therefore, optimizing your email to be compatible with mobile phones so that you reach as many people as possible will likely impact your open rates.
To ensure that mobile users do not struggle to read the emails you send them, all you need is to ensure your emails are mobile-friendly, including catering to different smartphone screens.
Remember to use larger CTA buttons and also compress images to reduce load time.
Ask them to add you to their contact list.
Another way to improve your open rates is by requesting your readers to add you to their trusted address book.
First off, this will increase the number of emails delivered, and because they know your address, they are less likely to mark your emails as spam.
If you share great content, you can be sure that many people will open your emails and even click.
Perform A/B testing
Just like other marketing strategies, an email marketing campaign requires testing. A/B testing offers an easy way to determine exactly how your campaigns are fairing.
Basically, you will need to create and A/B test different versions of your emails campaigns and their content to continuously discover the best-performing subjects that will improve your open rates.
At first, you will need to launch the subject line test and determine which one best suits your audience.
After identifying a subject line for your audience, go ahead, and A/B test the subject for a specific segment or the entire list. A good subject will be short, sweet, and relevant to your subscribers.
Track performance
After sending out emails to your prospective subscribers, prepare to follow the track. First, confirm if the emails you sent were successfully delivered and if they were effective for the intended promotion.
Concentrating on track performance will enable you to identify clearly if the emails are yielding good fruits or not. In addition, you may incorporate the unsubscribe tool to allow subscribers to opt out whenever they change their priorities.
Designing your email to your industries standards
Email design is the entire process of keenly creating and designing an email that satisfies your company’s needs while communicating the exact message that you wish for your target audience. Ideally, your emails should be designed to deliver useful content to subscribers.
Your email should be designed to capture the attention of your viewers and meet industry standards by using the right terminology that presents you as authentic.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a great ticket to online profits. By comparing your email marketing performance metrics against others in the industry, you can get to know how your campaigns are performing.
After reading this post, you should have the knowledge you need to improve and iterate your campaigns to move your open rates upward.