Tips to improve an email open rate

28 February, 2010

• email marketing

Letitia Power

Category: Online Marketing

We work with a lot of our clients on their email marketing and have become all to familiar with tweaking campaigns to achieve higher open rate. Below are a few tips and tricks to help you understand open rates and how to improve your campaign's performance.

What is an open rate?

An open rate is a calculation of how many people in a subscription database opened an email and is generally expressed as a percentage.

Typical open rates for different industries:

• 20 - 30% - E-Commerce, Technology, Insurance, Publishing and Media
• 30 - 40% - Real estate, Photography, Education
• 40 - 50% - Non-profit, Travel, Art, Religious, Government and Manufacturing

If your email marketing is achieving an open rate between 20% and 40%, you are probably somewhere around average.

These are just a general rule of thumb and can vary depending on the subscription database being used.

Tips on how to improve an open rate

We use a lot of different techniques to further entice recipients to open our clients' email marketing campaigns - here are a few examples:

• Experiment with your subject lines
• Send your campaign on a different day to split test the results
• Keep your campaigns focussed on one topic
• Put the important content at the top of the email
• Personalise the subject line
• Ask recipients what they would like information on

If you would like any more information on how we can help improve your email marketing results, contact us.