As perhaps the most powerful tool in the toolkit of any e-commerce business, mastering your email marketing strategy is key to driving sales and keeping your email subscribers engaged. Unaffected by social media and SEO algorithms, email marketing allows businesses to communicate directly via their audience’s inbox. This helps to establish and strengthen relationships, build brand trust, enhance personalisation, and drive sales.
However, no matter how personalised and attractive your emails are, and regardless of the incredible offers they contain, they simply won’t make an impact if people don’t open them. Therefore, email open rates are a key metric for any email marketing campaign.
Below, we’re going to walk you through everything you need to know about email open rates, including how to calculate them. Then, you’ll discover the top 10 ways to improve email open rates, allowing you to bring your email marketing campaigns to another level.
Understanding Email Open Rates
Email open rates measure how many recipients open an email compared to the total number of delivered emails. This simple but crucial metric provides marketing teams with important insights into how their email strategy is performing.
While email open rate figures don’t specify exactly what about an email caused some recipients to open it and others to ignore it, they offer general feedback. Overall, these numbers hint at the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of factors including:
- Subject line: High email open rates likely suggest that your marketing team is doing a great job creating catchy, snappy, and attractive subject lines. When done right, this short arrangement of words does wonders to tempt recipients to open up an email.
- Sender reputation: Extremely low email open rates indicate that you have a reputation to work on; your expertly written emails are consistently landing in spam folders and your marketing work is going to waste.
- Sending times: The time at which your email lands in a recipient’s inbox greatly influences the chances of them opening it. Good timing will place your communication at the top of their inbox.
- Audience engagement: This metric can also help to inform you of how engaged your audience truly is. If your rates are low, it’ll give you the motivation to work on building a stronger brand relationship.
How to Calculate Email Open Rates
Far from complex, determining email open rates is a simple task for most. It’s simply a percentage of recipients who opened an email compared to the total number of emails delivered. To figure out your email open rates, you can plug your unique figures into this general equation:
Email open rate = (total opens / emails delivered) × 100
So, let’s say you sent out 1,000 emails to customers who’ve signed up for your email list, and 250 recipients opened them. Using the formula above, this gives us the following equation:
(250 / 1,000) × 100 = 25%
While this figure might at first seem fairly low, it falls smack bang in the range of 20–30% that is often considered good for most industries.¹ Anything above 30% usually ranks as excellent, whereas rates below 15% require some serious improvement.
But how can you get your hands on these figures in the first place? Well, a range of analytical tools can give you access to these numbers, alongside other important data sets such as click-through rate, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
Now that you’re aware of the importance of email open rates and how to calculate them, we’re going to cover 10 simple ways to send yours through the roof!
Email open rates measure how many recipients open an email compared to the total number of emails sent. They have profound effects on the impact of an email marketing campaign.
10 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates
Now, pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea, get comfortable, and learn how to drastically improve your email open rates to boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
1. Get to Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience is essential to boosting email open rates and to the success of your business overall. Unlock this very important door, and you’ll know exactly how to appeal to potential and existing customers alike.
You must first set out to determine who they are, what they care about, and—most importantly—when they check their email. Use the following techniques to pull this off:
- Segment your audience: Divide your email subscribers up into key lists based on demographics, purchase history, engagement level, personal preferences, and other valuable variables.
- Survey your subscribers: You can use simple surveys to gather much of this information. Likewise, you can request most of this information on your email sign-up form.
- Use analytical tools: There are a host of email marketing tools out there that your team can use to boost email open rates. Some of these analytical platforms offer behavioural targeting that allows you to customise emails accordingly.
- Monitor engagement patterns: Analytical tools can also help to determine engagement patterns, such as email open rate and subsequent click-through rates. Continue to use what works, and ditch what doesn’t.
2. Write Compelling Subject Lines
Our email inboxes are flooded daily with all manner of promotions, newsletters, updates, personal communications, work messages, order details, and, of course, spam. If you want your marketing emails to stick out and stand any chance of being opened, you need to cook up some excellent subject lines.
Look at it this way: your subject lines act as gatekeepers. They are the first part of any email that your recipients see. If your subjects are boring and dull, they’ll happily scroll on by until they find something appealing. To prevent this from happening, use the following tips to craft highly clickable subject lines for your emails:
- Keep things brief: Limit your subject lines to under 50 characters to make sure they don’t get cut off.
- Use actionable words: Use words that spur action, such as “discover”, “grab”, and “save”.
- Leverage urgency: Make sure your recipients know that they have to act fast to benefit. Use additional phrases such as “last chance”, “act now”, and “ends tonight” to create a sense of urgency.
- Test emojis: Try using different emojis in your subject lines to see which perform best.
3. Optimise Send Times
Send times play a crucial role in optimising email open rates. Your email subscribers are asleep during the night and working for most of the day. Therefore, you need to pinpoint the exact time to send out emails to segmented groups in order to maximise impact.
Send your emails at the wrong moments, and they’ll get buried beneath countless others vying for the attention of the recipient. Numerous industry sources suggest that the best times to send emails are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings—generally around 10 am.
However, your approach should cater to your specific audience. For example, office workers are likely to check their personal email during lunch, whereas night owls might log into their inbox at around 10 pm.
Ultimately, you need to test this for yourself. After segmenting your email subscribers by time zone, create subgroups within each region. Correlate the time of day with the highest email open rates in each segmented group.
4. Personalisation Beyond the First Name
Personalising emails can substantially enhance the chances of a recipient opening them. Why? Because they’ll see them as friendly, trustworthy, and genuinely useful. Sure, slapping “Hey, John” at the start of your email offers an element of personalisation, but you can offer your recipient much more than that.
Using your preferred analytical tools, leverage behavioural data to truly tailor emails to each recipient. Consider strategies such as:
- Recommend products based on past purchases.
- Send birthday or anniversary emails.
- Customise content based on past interaction with your brand.
- Segment based on customer-declared interests and preferences.
- Offer location-based deals or events.
- Localise offers based on regional days of significance.
5. Use a Recognisable Sender Name
Have you ever received emails from “[email protected]” and thought, “Who is that and what do they want from me?”. Yeah, pretty much everybody reacts the same way when they receive communications from seemingly anonymous brands.
Maintaining transparency in every area is paramount for building brand trust, even down to your sender name. As well as avoiding a cliche email address like the one mentioned above, you should work on putting a face to your email communications.
Say hello and sign off with a real name, such as “Sarah from [name of business]”. Plus, make sure your brand name appears consistently throughout your emails. Be consistent with both of these approaches and you’ll find that email open rate improves in parallel to brand relationship.
6. Write a Preview Text That Hooks Readers
An eye-catching subject line sometimes isn’t enough to entice a recipient into opening your emails. You’ll also need to craft attractive and compelling preview texts to maximise email open rates.
Preview texts are those little snippets that show up next to your subject lines. You can view them as your second chance to grab attention. Follow these simple rules to make them as effective as possible:
- Add context: Use your preview texts to expand on subject lines. Further describe the benefits the recipient will receive by opening the email.
- Keep them short: Make your preview texts short and engaging; shoot for 30–90 characters.
- Avoid repetition: Don’t repeat what you’ve already written in your subject. Use the extra space to communicate something unique and attractive.
- Include a CTA: Add a call to action (CTA) to increase intrigue and instruct your reader.
7. Ensure Emails Are Mobile-Friendly
Current data suggests that 60% of emails are opened on mobile devices.² If your email looks clunky, wonky, and half-missing on a phone, people aren’t going to stay around.
Format all of your email marketing communications to look smooth, clean, and simple on both desktop and mobile devices. Make a good first impression on your recipients to ensure they know that opening your emails leads to a good user experience. Focus on big, tappable buttons, readable fonts, and a single-column layout for easy scrolling.
8. Segment Your Email List for Targeted Campaigns
We quickly touched on segmentation earlier, but it’s worth its own special section. Sending the same email to everyone is like serving the same pizza to a room that includes gluten-free vegans; some might bite, but others will find it unappealing.
You need to customise your recipe to different groups to enhance the comprehensive impact of your email marketing strategy. Set your team the task of combing through your email database and making segments based on certain characteristics. These should include:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location
- Behaviours: Past purchases, cart content, browsing habits
- Engagement: Active vs inactive users, customer loyalty
- New subscribers: New recipients who have just signed up
Now, you can tailor your email communications to each of your segments, enhancing customisation, timing, and content.
9. Test and Refine Your Strategy
What works today might flop tomorrow. That’s why testing is key. A/B test your subject lines (e.g. “Save Now!” vs “Last Chance to Save!”), send times (morning vs afternoon), and sender names.
Most email tools let you split-test easily—just send two versions to a small group, see what wins, and then roll out the winner to everyone. Keep tweaking based on what your data tells you. Test one variable at a time for clear results.
10. Maintain a Clean Email List
Deadweight drags you down. Inactive subscribers—those who haven’t opened an email in months—hurt your open rates and sender reputation. Clean your list regularly by:
- Sending a “We miss you!” re-engagement email
- Removing anyone who still doesn’t respond after 30 days
A smaller, engaged list beats a bloated, silent one every time. Quality over quantity, folks!
Boosting email open rates comes down to knowing your audience, crafting irresistible subject lines and previews, optimising timing, and keeping your list clean—all while testing what works best for your subscribers.
Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
There you have it—10 simple and practical ways to reliably enhance email open rates. Email marketing certainly remains one of the best ways to build relationships and drive sales, but a “set it and forget it” approach rarely works.
In truth, it takes effort, a bit of experimentation and testing, and a focus on what your audience really wants. Start out small by trying to improve on one or two of the tips from the list above. Then, after seeing success in these areas, maintain it while moving on to other areas. Before you know it, you’ll see your email open rates skyrocket, alongside brand trust and loyalty, click-through rates, and conversions.
References:
1. MacDonald S. Email Open Rates: A Scientific, Step by Step Guide for 2020. CRM Blog: Articles, Tips and Strategies by SuperOffice. Published December 13, 2019. https://www.superoffice.com/blog/email-open-rates/
2. Link J. 10 Email Marketing Statistics You Need to Know (Updated 2021). Constant Contact. Published September 21, 2020. https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics/
