Check Your Open Rate First

You’ve just got your email marketing campaign out and you’re now eager to find out whether you performed well…

“But what data should I look at?”

Your open rate, of course.

The open rate is the percentage of subscribers who received your email in their mailbox and actually opened it. It shows how your campaign performed and how thrilled your audience was with your email.

You should take your open rate as a performance guide, as it is not 100 percent accurate. To figure this data out, MailChimp includes an invisible image into your marketing campaign. Then, MailChimp counts how often the image is loaded among the delivered emails. If your subscriber’s inbox does not load images, this email won’t be registered as opened. But if this recipient clicks on a link, MailChimp will consider the email as opened.

“What open rate should I expect?”

Don’t expect to get an 80 percent open rate! Even 50 percent is hard to reach. In fact, you should be happy whenever you get an open rate of more than 30 percent! Industry averages range between 24 and 30 percent (check out MailChimp’s email marketing benchmarks).

The higher the open rate, the better.

A high open rate shows that your audience resonates with your emails. On the contrary, a low open rate indicates that there may be a problem. Perhaps your subject line is not relevant enough. Maybe your subscribers are too diverse and aren’t interested in all your content. Or, maybe you are sending too many campaigns, and you’re driving your audience crazy…

Your email performance depends on other factors, such as your industry, company size and topics. Let’s say, you work for a church, a sports team or a nonprofit. Chances are that you get higher open rates than if you were working a finance company. The reasons are simple: your audience is composed of enthusiastic supporters. If you cover niche topics, like gardening, you’ll probably have great open rates too. Your readers are passionate about your topic, so they’re happy to read whatever you send them!

To sum up: check your open rate!

Whenever you send a campaign out, don’t forget to check your open rate. And be aware that 80 percent of opens take place within 48 hours after you sent your email. If your open rate is higher than your industry average, you’re all good! If it’s lower, you may want to do some optimization work. If so, don’t worry, we’ll give you some actionable tips in a future post!