People seem to forget that the primary tool for reaching out to businesses is still email marketing.
But I'm sure I don't need to tell you how important email marketing is, do I? You're probably already used to receiving promotional emails from a variety of large eCommerce companies (even if you don't remember signing up for them). Why don't you use email marketing if the big players are still using it and making millions?
However, as an email marketer, this puts you in a difficult position. If your email marketing campaigns do not stand out, they will be overshadowed by emails from other companies. Then it becomes part of the deluge of emails that no one wants to read, wasting your time, effort, and opportunity.
I don't want you to end up like that with your email marketing campaigns. So, in this article, I'll show you how to create a high opening email campaign that people will 1) open and 2) appreciate. Let's get started!
The science behind an email campaign's open rate
The science and data presented in this section will assist you in understanding how people open your email marketing campaigns and will assist you in increasing email open rates, which will positively affect the overall performance of the email marketing strategy.
Before I get into the data, you and I should first understand this metric. The email open rate is commonly defined as the number of recipients who click to open your email. It appears to be logical, but this is not the case with email marketing.
An email is considered opened only when one of the following conditions is met:
- The recipient allows your email's images to be displayed in full view or in the email's preview pane.
- The email's recipient clicks on a link.
- You get the idea: only when the recipient allows your email to fully load or clicks on a link can you consider it opened. But how do you compute email open rates?
An email service provider (ESP) calculates the open rate of your emails by taking the number of recipients who opened your email and dividing it by the number of emails that were not bounced and thus successfully reached the recipients.
For example, if you sent 1000 emails and 100 of them did not reach their intended recipients, you will have 900 delivered emails. Let's say that 100 of these 900 emails were opened. This means that the email campaign has an 11% open rate (100 emails opened from 900 delivered).
Because undelivered emails cannot be opened, they are not counted in the open rate percentage. Now that you understand email campaign open rates, let's look at industry statistics to see how you can identify a high open rate.
The average email open rate among industries
For several years, B2B email marketing has been one of the most popular marketing channels, and the average number of promotional emails sent to consumers has increased over time. Many people believe that the open rate for email marketing is declining.
That, however, was not the case. From 2015 to 2018, the global average email open rate remained stable at around 24%. However, the average open rate fell to 21.3% in 2020. I'm not sure why, but perhaps because all businesses began sending emails during the pandemic?
Despite this, does a drop in email open rates portend the end of email marketing? Obviously not. It's not the first time email open rates have dropped, and it won't be the last.
The good news is that when we look at historical data, we can see that every time there is a decrease, it is often followed by a period of rapid growth for email marketing. As a result, we can anticipate an increase in 2021.
Before you can get more people to open your emails, you must first answer the following questions: What is the current email open rate? How many people read your emails right now?
This is where the industry standard for email marketing open rate reports comes in. This is critical for you to understand how the industry is changing in terms of email marketing in general, as well as your own benchmark based on email campaign performance. This number is frequently provided by your email service provider.
Here are the email open rates based on the performance of an email campaign in each country. As you can see, email open rates differ depending on the country.
The average email open rate across all industries in 2020 was 18%. So, if you can achieve an open rate greater than 19%, you're doing great!
If not, there is no need to be concerned. You should be more familiar with your email subscribers than any other sender. Assume your campaigns consistently have a 15% open rate, which is slightly lower than average, but your email campaigns still produce results. In that case, even if the "industry average" suggests otherwise, it is clear that you do not underperform.
Of course, average statistics should be interpreted with caution. For example, open email rates in the insurance industry differ from those in the healthcare industry. And Asian open rates differ from those in Europe.
So, what is the best strategy for having a high opening email campaign? Let's find out in the following section.
How to write a high opening email campaign
If you're reading this, you probably want to increase your email campaign open rates. So you can refer to my top ten tips for creating a high open rate email campaign.
Thank you for reading
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