The opening rate of an email campaign is the percentage of the number of your subscribers who opened your email. It is an important metric to study as it shows you how efficient your email marketing campaign is, or if you email marketing strategy is working.
The average opening rate should be between 12% to 25%. Anything below that could suggest that you are either targeting the wrong kind of audience, or that your content is not interesting enough for your audience to open your emails. Read below for some tips about how to improve your opening rate.
But how do we know who opens your email?
Well, to know exactly who opens an email, we will insert an invisible picture with a link inside each email you send. In this way, every time someone opens one of your emails, we will see it. This works very well for Mac and iOS users because they open images by default. However, this method works less well for PC/Outlook as images are not automatically downloaded. Therefore, a PC/Outlook user could have read the email without downloading the images, and it won’t count as an opening.
Opening Rates for: Personalized vs Non-Personalized Emails vs Automatic Emails
Personalized emails have an opening rate of 20.9% while non-personalized emails have an opening rate of 9.68% and automatic emails have a 29. 57% opening rate.
Personalized emails are those which use dynamic fields to insert information specifically directed to a customers or receiver and, therefore, they tend to have a higher opening rate than the average non-personalized email.
Automatic emails also include transactional emails. Transactional and automatic emails are highly personalized and can be emails such as lost passwords, bills, and subscription emails. Therefore, these types of emails tend to have the highest opening rates.
Overall, we can see that personalized emails have increased opening rates of 50%, demonstrating that readers appreciate having theirs emails personalized.
This tells us that we need to invest in knowing our audience and personalizing each email. Here are some other advantages of personalizing your newsletters
- Avoid falling into spam folders
- Built customer loyalty
- Increase opening and click through rates
