Sending emails to your subscribers is one thing, but having them open the emails is an important aspect of email marketing. To truly know how successful you are at email marketing, you need to establish your email open rate.
This is very important because your business relies on whether your subscribers see what you have to offer them or not. So, to make the most out of your email campaigns and to have a good open rate, your subscribers should be persuaded to take action and actually open your emails.
In a perfect world, all of your subscribers would open every email that goes out with every email campaign you do. However, that would be highly unlikely because there are so many factors that are involved in preventing that from happening.
According to statistics, an excellent open rate would be around 20%. So with 1 in every 5 emails you send out, there is the possibility of sales or act on what you are sending out, which means there is good potential for your business.
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How to calculate the open rate for your email campaigns
Determining the open rate of your email campaigns is super easy. This is because most email services provide you with that specific information built into their dashboards. So, you can easily navigate to your dashboard and have a look.
However, we will provide a simple math formula for you here. Open rate equals unique opens divided by the number of emails sent out minus bounced emails.
Formula: Open rate = unique opens / number of emails – bounced emails.
The straightforward math is, the higher your unique opens, the better for your business. So the goal for you should be to use that information to improve your subject lines and possibly drive that open rate higher.
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Click-through rates are much more telling
When it comes to the actual success of your email campaigns, it much more valuable to you as a business owner to determine the percentage of your subscribers who are taking action on your email campaigns.
By figuring out what is the rate of actual click-throughs from those emails that you are sending out tells you that they were interested enough to click the link or act upon your message inside the email.
At the end of the day, it is nice to know your email open rates for all of your email campaigns, but knowing your click-through rate is much more valuable data.
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5 Ways to Evaluate Your Own Email Open Rate
Using all of the available data from the dashboard provided by your email service, you can collect and analyze the data having to do with your email campaign.
There are several ways that you can evaluate the data and benchmark your own open rates. Then you would be in a better position to set realistic goals for future email campaigns.
We came up with 5 ways that you can benchmark your email campaigns.
- Gather and chart the open rates from the past four quarters
Most email marketing services come with a responsive dashboard, displaying data and metrics from the reports and analytics of your campaign. So, on your dashboard, you can find all of the rates that your emails were open by your subscribers over the past four quarters.
When you put all of that data into a chart, you can easily look at all the information in a much more useful way.
- Determine your average open rate
There is a specific formula for determining the average open rate for email campaigns. Looking at the chart with all of the open rates listed, you have to add up all of the rates individually.
Then you take that number and divide it by the total number of the averages that you counted, and that will be considered your average open rate for the last year.
- Identify any obvious outliers
Once you establish the average open rate, you want to look for any obvious outlier (higher or lower than the average). Later, you can try to figure out why these specific email campaigns did really well or really poorly. Be sure to note anything that you might believe could have caused this unique occurrence for future use.
- Check for patterns or trends
Looking at all of the data in a chart format can make it easier to spot obvious patterns and trends. With this kind of data, you can make a much better decision for your future email campaigns.
Be sure to dig a little deeper to see if specific times you sent emails out may have influenced open rates. For example, there could have been a certain topic that got more subscribers to open the email.
- Set realistic open rate goals
Goal setting is an essential tool for all business owners. It is one of the best ways to evaluate whether or not your progress is on track. When it comes to an email marketing business, you need to be sure that you set your email open rates at a realistic rate to reach them successfully.
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4 Things That Can Affect Your Email Open Rates
- Poorly organized subscriber list
You should always organize your subscribers on your lists. Without a well-organized list, you risk sending out emails that will not be accepted, and your open and click-through rates will suffer mightly. Be sure that you analyze your email campaign data and use it to segment your subscriber list.
- Too many inactive subscribers
Having too many of your subscribers on your email list not actively opening your emails can be detrimental to your business. So, you should constantly be evaluating your list and the email campaign data that you can find on your email service dashboard.
- Poorly thought out subject lines
One of the primary causes of subscribers not opening emails is they aren’t impressed with the subject lines of your emails as they hit their inboxes. So if you don’t excite them with your subject line, you might as well not be sending them out in the first place.
So, you have to put in the work that it takes to come up with eye-catching subject lines that go along with your messages. To developed an engaging subject line with rich body content, it’s recommended to check out the important tips for writing a persuasive email campaign.
- Unqualified subscribers
It is possible to purchase an email list. However, this appears to be a poor strategy because you are unlikely to reach your intended audience. So, having a list of subscribers that are not interested in your products, services, or opportunities because you try to shortcut the process by buying an email list will almost certainly end badly. You have to qualify all of your subscribers on your list to be successful.