What's a good email open rate?

Email marketing benchmark statistics to help you know whether you're on the right track.

Sending marketing emails is a great start.

Understanding how they perform best is even better. 

As soon as your email lands in your customers’ inboxes, you’ll begin to see the results roll in. But what do the numbers mean? And how well are your emails performing in comparison to others in your industry? 

With Transpond’s insights, you can monitor and track your email campaigns with detailed analytics, so you know what’s happening, when, and with who. However, if you’re not sure of the benchmark statistics, then you won’t be sure what to expect or how to compare your performance to your competitors either. And if you don’t know how you’re doing, how will you know how to improve? 

What is an open rate?

An open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email. It’s worth noting that bounced emails are not included in the metric, as emails that are not delivered cannot be opened - so these will not affect your open rate. 

Different sources may tell you different things, but the general consensus is that a healthy email open rate can be anywhere between 20% - 40% (or higher), although this will vary from industry to industry. 

At Transpond, millions of emails are sent every month on our platform, providing us with valuable and trackable data. Through this, we’re able to calculate the average industry open rates of our customers.

In this blog, we’ll share these benchmark statistics so that you can gain a better idea of how high your email open rates are in comparison to others in similar fields. Plus, we’ll give Transpond’s top tips for increasing your open rates. 

Here are 10 average open rates calculated by Transpond: 

Keeping up with the average open rate 

Increasing your open rate is easy once you know how, but it might mean transforming your email marketing style.

To help you get the most out of your emails, and start seeing those numbers rise, we’ve pulled together our top tips for increasing your open rate.  

It’s all about timing 

Do you check your emails at 5pm? No! 

If you’re sending out your emails at random times, it’s no surprise that the open rates aren’t up to scratch. It sounds obvious, but emails should land in a recipients’ inbox at times when they’re most likely to open them. 

Based on 3 months of Transpond traffic, the highest open rate is on Wednesdays at 1pm. On top of this, many studies around general email open rates have suggested that more emails are opened after lunch than any other time of day. 

Spend time on the subject line 

The subject line is the very first thing the recipient reads, so it holds a lot of power. 

6 to 10 words are proven to be the perfect amount for a subject line, and including the recipient's name (using a merge tag) is also known to boost open rate. But the most important thing is that you catch the attention of the person scrolling through their emails - whether this be with an offer up front, an overview of what the email is about, or a quote from a famous film (yes, this is a popular technique!). 

Optimise your emails for mobile 

Smart phones are more popular than ever, and so is checking emails on the go. If your emails are only optimised for desktop, you’re really missing a trick. 

By optimising your emails for mobile and desktop (which you can do with Transpond), your emails are accessible no matter the device they’re opened on. 

Segment your email lists

Targeting your emails to specific groups of people can mean they’re more tailored, and therefore more likely to be opened. 

There are various buyer personas - based on what they’ve opted in to, their behaviour on your website, previous purchases, demographics and what they’ve clicked on in your email (to name only a few). 

Segment these personas and tailor their emails based on their activity. 

Create emails that get opened with Transpond

Increasing your email open rate is simpler when you have the right tools in place. Now, with AI Content Assistant, Transpond just became even more effective.

Improve your open rate by getting started with Transpond for free today: https://app.transpond.io/