How To Measure Email Open Rate And How To Increase Yours

There is no denying that the application of email marketing as a prime medium of communication in business has brought about a significant shift in the way businesses operate. What’s the advantage? You get to interact with your customers from anywhere 24X7 without any barrier. Furthermore, email communication bridges the gap between customers and employees that are caused due to various external factors like distance, time difference, busy schedule, and other miscellaneous factors.

Email communication doesn’t cause any type of direct interference to the typical schedule of the people. Rather, emails give the benefit of doubt to the customers by empowering them to decide whether to respond or not to a particular email. Some of the most popular email marketing statistics authenticate the success rate of emails. For instance, one famous study by Statista has shown that, In 2019, global email users amounted to 3.9 billion users. That’s quite a significant number and hence, if you are running a business, it is a definite choice to implement email marketing to boost your communication channel.

This blog from Apptivo walks you through an overview of email marketing concentrating on email click through rate, email open rate, email marketing benchmarks, and other factors associated with email marketing.
Email Marketing – An Overview

Did you know? The first electronic mail was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a programmer working for MIT’s ARPANET project. Following him, in 1978, Gary Thuerk sent the first mass email to 400 recipients. It was a promotional mail that laid the foundation for today’s email marketing and email campaigns. These events are historic as they changed the way businesses function and how people communicate with employees. This email has evolved over the years and now, email marketing is powered with powerful automation tools. Now, let’s look into some of the basics!

What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is a type of direct marketing where emails are sent to a group of customers to promote your products and services. Through emails, customers are made aware of the latest happenings associated with your business. These emails can be for promotion, announcements, sales, business requests, and other purposes. For example, sending mass emails to 100 users with regards to a new product launched by your company is a type of email marketing.

What are the four types of Marketing Emails?

Marketing emails are broadly classified into four categories.

By sending the right emails at the correct time, businesses can easily improve their conversion rate and reduce customer churn.

What are Email Marketing Benchmarks?

Email marketing benchmarks refer to the email marketing metrics that are normally leveraged by businesses and managers to monitor and analyze the performance of their marketing campaigns. The email marketing benchmarks have evolved over time owing to the transformation in email marketing and development in technology. Some of the common email marketing benchmarks include:

• Click to open rate
• Average open rate
• Spam complaints
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate

As this blog focuses more on Email Open Rate, we will talk about this concept in detail.

Email Open Rate

Email open rate is defined as the percentage of email subscribers that have opened the email when compared to the total number of email subscribers that have signed up to receive your emails. The average email open rate is 18%.

Email Open Rate Formula

The Open Rate is measured using the below formula,

Open Rate = (Total no of emails opened/ Total no of emails delivered) * 100

For example, if you have 1000 subscribers and only 700 have opened your email, then the email open rate is 70%.

Want to know just how good of an email open rate that you’re currently operating with but are unsure where to start? Your open rate is one of the most important statistics when it comes to your email list and paying close attention to the numbers can save you a lot of headaches and help you optimize your email CTR, ultimately making you more money.

What should you be keeping track of?

As a business that uses a mailing list, five key parameters can be kept note of so that you can see how effective your mailing strategy is:

How many people open the emails

How many people click on links within the emails

How many people forward your emails

How many people complain

How many people forward the emails

What is a good email open rate?

Email open rates differ from industry to industry, but an overall average of emails opened can be quoted at the 20-25% mark. Some industries – such as ‘arts and artists’, ‘government’ and ‘hobbies’ are shown to reach 26-27% whereas others such as ‘daily deals/e-coupons’ and ‘e-commerce’ struggle to reach a 16% open rate.

How to calculate email open rate?

Top email providers will calculate the open rates for you – however, if you’re struggling to find the value or the provider does not calculate the value automatically, it can be solved with the equation below:

Open Rate = Unique Opens / (Number of Emails Sent – Bounces)

Alternatively, if you’re using tools like Apptivo Campaigns, you can access all the information such as open rate, bounce rate, engagement rate and compare the performance between campaigns for a better understanding of what worked and didn’t.

How to increase email open rate?

So you’ve figured out what your open rate is and how it stacks against the competition. You may be pleased, you may be disappointed, and you may be bang on average, but the chances are that you’re going to want to increase your email open rate.

There’s a huge number of ways to increase your email open rate from the time of day that emails are sent out to using direct and curiosity-based subject lines. Clearing out inactive email addresses from the list is another way to increase your open rate although this doesn’t mean that more people will open the emails – but will give a more honest view into the numbers.

Get creative with your email marketing and keep an eye on your open rate for increased activity.

How does Apptivo help in increasing your email open rate?

Apptivo has an exclusive email marketing solution that covers your entire B2B email marketing strategy and B2C email marketing strategy. The suite of applications that are designed especially for Marketing professionals helps your teams to create campaigns, schedule launches, add personalized target lists and gauge the email marketing statistics.

Smart Templates

The Campaigns app of Apptivo enables your marketing team to create customized campaigns with amazing templates that are preloaded in their library. Apptivo has the provision to create basic, standard, and MJML templates. In addition to using the templates from the library, employees can also create their custom templates with attractive subject lines. The design tools include various attributes that leave no stone unturned to make your email template a great success. You can do test launches to your native emails and check the campaigns directly.

Real-time Tracking

The dashboard facility available in campaigns enables employees to track the performance of their campaigns. From here, managers can monitor the click to open rate, bounce rate, spam report, and other important email marketing metrics. There is no need for your business to purchase the entire email quota. Rather, you can choose a plan that suits your business purpose and email requirements. Based on your choice, the allowed email limit will be allocated.

Tailor-made Launch

Every campaign designed and launched from Apptivo’s Campaigns app is completely trackable. In short, you can have an idea of the communication status of all the emails that are added as recipients in your campaign. Here, you can see the details of emails delivered, opened, and clicked. Along with this, you can also track the list of recipients who have unsubscribed, or blocked your emails. Through this, you can improve the authenticity of your emails and take appropriate action to make your campaigns more successful. In email marketing, there is no perfect strategy. Through repeated analysis, marketing teams can find the right solutions and launch effective campaigns that cannot be ignored easily.

Email open rate is a broader term and it is more about working on the background to improve the email open rate. Various factors and characteristics of a campaign should be considered to make it successful. To achieve this, businesses should leverage powerful solutions like Apptivo that have advanced automation tools.

Conclusion

Email marketing is here to stay and businesses are continuously investing huge amounts of funds depending on the size of their business to reach out to larger audiences and make their communication successful. Hence, there are a number of laws and regulations in countries across the world to prevent any type of inconvenience for the recipients. Apptivo has every tool you need to design and launch a successful campaign that not only retains your existing customers but also brings in new customers. Sign up to Apptivo today to obtain maximum productivity from your email campaigns.

Also, Read

• Difference between a Campaign and a Quick Campaign?
• How do I launch a Campaign?
• How to view the campaign launch history in Apptivo’s Campaign app?