Open Rate Explained In Simple Terms

What Is An Open Rate?

Email marketing has always been one of the most used and preferred choices of online marketers to reach out to their target audience. Since its invention, email has resulted in the gradual downfall of conventional methods of communication. So naturally, marketers needed to change their game plan and upgrade their marketing tactics to use email as an effective medium for marketing their products and services.

Having understood the significance of email marketing, the next challenge that marketers faced was how to analyze the success of their marketing campaigns? The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to convert a prospective lead into a paying customer.

Let’s start with the basics. How do you define an open rate? Suppose you have used your marketing strategies to obtain the email ids of your leads and built a mailer list. You have now prepared an email that contains educational as well as promotional content, which you have prepared to attract these leads to your website.

Once you shoot out this email, it reaches the inboxes of your leads. The number of people who open your email out of the total number of people you sent this email to, will define the open rate of your email.

So, in this case, if you have sent this email to 100 email ids and say, 30 people, opened your email subsequently, then the open rate will be (30/100) x 100 = 30%.

Significance Of Open Rate

Whenever you prepare an email marketing strategy, you should start with how to get people to open your email. Suppose you have used your best resources to create email content that is very high-quality and offers amazing discounts to new customers. You are sure that the email content you have prepared is sure to draw a large amount of traffic to your website. But how do you know that the leads you have sent the email to have even opened it or not?

The open rate in email marketing is a very straight-cut parameter to judge the basic effectiveness of an email. It measures the very first step in the customer interaction process. If a prospective customer does not even open your email, then how are you supposed to engage with them via the email content?

So, the open rate will tell you whether or not your email marketing technique is effective enough to convince prospective customers to open an email and read its contents.

Where do we Set the Bar?

Benchmarking Email Open Rates

It has been found that many factors affect the email open rate. One of the primary requirements of your email marketing plan is to have meaningful content that will impact the target audience. Without this, you will never be able to sustain a good email open rate. If the content is not high-quality the prospective customers will lose interest, and even though they might open your emails a few times initially, they will stop opening your emails once their interest wanes out.

Another important aspect that sometimes determines your email open rate is the frequency of your emails. If you sent too many emails too soon, then it could irritate your prospective customer if they don’t find your emails useful. It could result in not only the deletion of your emails but also the prospect could end up unsubscribing from your mailer list or the worst, marking your email as spam. Choose a reasonable frequency for your email campaign so that you can avoid these instances.

Various studies suggest that the open rate varies depending on the topic of the email as well as the industry to which it pertains. However, it has been observed that on average the open rate varies between 15% and 30%.

You can use these few tricks to make sure you maintain a good email open rate...

How To Improve Email Open Rates

There are other factors that also significantly impact the email open rate such as the demography of your target audience, connectivity, or server issues faced by any prospective customer, etc.

  • Create an attractive subject line to quickly draw the attention of the target customer.
  • Keep your mailer list updated. Email sent to any closed email account will be rejected by the email server and your open rate is bound to get affected.
  • Increase the quality of your mailer list. What this effectively means is that includes email contacts of those people who are likely to benefit the most by using your products and services. This way if you send relevant content to relevant people, then it is highly likely that these people will open your email and read the content.
  • Optimize your email content in such a way that the email can be easily accessed and opened on any mobile device. This will ensure that people have the flexibility to open your email anytime and anywhere they want, which is bound to increase the probability of them opening your email.

As mentioned before, the open rate is a very basic measurement method. This parameter in itself is not sufficient to measure the success of an email marketing campaign. Even the efficiency of the method is also put under the scanner at times. This is because having a good email open rate does not guarantee that your audience has interacted with the email and has been convinced to take the next step in their journey from lead to a paying customer.

So, it becomes important that the open rate is read in conjunction with various other marketing analytical aspects to decide whether the email marketing campaign has been a success or failure.