Open rate - what is it and how can it be improved?

Email marketing is an excellent tool. Not only does it allow us to establish and nurture relationships with our recipients, but it also enables us to effectively build our company's image as an expert. With the help of mailing campaigns, we can also generate interest in our products or services. To enjoy all these benefits, however, the emails we send must be opened. And this is not as easy to achieve as some may think. Have you completed an email campaign, but don't know what to do next? Are you wondering how to measure its success? There are metrics for this, and the eponymous open rate is one of them. Read the article and you will find out not only what it determines, but also how to effectively increase it. 

Open rate - key information

Open rate is one of the basic indicators by which the effectiveness of a mailing campaign sent can be 'examined'. In Polish we simply call it the opening indicator. It is what marketers usually look at when analysing their activities.

Open rate determines, how many of the messages sent were opened by the recipients. Interestingly, the message open rate can apply to more than just newsletters. It can also refer to marketing activities such as push notifications or SMS campaigns. It is useful wherever you want to know the ratio of two values - the number of open messages to the number of total messages sent.

How does the open rate work? Most email marketing tools provide ready-to-use data. These can usually be found in the statistics segment - be it individual emails or entire campaigns. However, nothing prevents you from calculating the open rate yourself - it's not a complicated operation. All you need to do is check how many of the messages you have sent have been opened and divide this number by the number of addresses on the mailing list in question. Now multiply the result times 100% and.... open rate calculated!

Factors affecting open rate - what determines whether your email gets opened?

Before considering how to increase the open rate, it is worth answering the question of what actually influences whether a recipient will open a message. The primary factors are three:

1. will the email be delivered?
2. Will the recipient see it among a ton of other messages?
3. and also, will the message be interesting enough for the recipient to decide to open it?

E-mail deliverability

Let's focus on the first point in the list above, which is the deliverability of content. This is an indicator of whether the emails we send reach the inboxes at all. After all, nobody wants their messages to end up in the SPAM folder! Why might this be happening? There may be several sources of the problem, for example Poor quality of address database, low message open rate, poor sender "reputation" or high number of SPAM markings by recipients. To improve deliverability, the first thing to do is to ensure that the reputation of the email address from which you send messages is good. This consists of the reputation of IP, domain reputation and content reputation. It is these elements that are taken into account by email service providers. Among other things, we need to avoid sending large, 'suspicious' files, spammy headers and.... buying ready-made recipient databases.

Attractiveness of headlines

An attractive email title is half the battle. Just think about how we browse our own mailboxes. They probably receive a dozen or even several dozen messages a day. There is no way we review every single one of them. We scan the list of incoming emails and... we delete most of them. According to the SARE report on the use of electronic mail only 18.78% respondents declare that they do not delete emails without first opening them. The rest have no scruples. Why. More than half (59,38%) of those surveyed respond that the messages are spam and 42,36% indicate that the title is not interesting. This is why, if you are sending emails, it is so important to stand out. You need to make the recipient curious, intrigued and engaged so that they decide to see the whole message.

Ways to increase the open rate

The factors listed above have an overwhelming influence on whether the email you send will be opened. Of course, there are others. These include: matching the subject of the email to the recipient, time of day or personalisation of the header.

You already know what open rate is and what affects it. Now it's time to look at ways to increase it!

Refine the subject of the email

As you have already read in the previous part of this article, the subject line has a key influence on whether an email will be opened. We should pay as much attention to writing the subject line as we do to crafting the entire message, and this is not an exaggeration! So what if the content of your emails is brilliant, but nobody opens them? Therefore, the headline should grab attention, be concise and encourage action. Don't forget to personalise your headlines. According to the audience behaviour survey, as many as 62% of them open emails because they see their name in the subject line.

Add a preheader

Preheaders, i.e. the first lines of textwhich are located behind the title of the email also have an impact on the open rate. They are visible in Gmail inboxes, among others. How do you use them? For example, as a placeholder for the email subject line.

Get to know your audience

There is no single recipe for knowing the habits of your audience - it requires testing first and foremost. Experiment with sending emails at different times of day and on different days of the week. Analyse when the open rate was highest and optimise future campaigns with this in mind.

Don't forget mobile device users

Where do you usually read your mail? According to data provided by Freshmail As many as 53% of all emails are opened on smartphones. Therefore, when creating emails, care should be taken to displayed correctly on every device. What is particularly important?

• large font size - minimum 14px
• clickable elements visible at a glance and large buttons (minimum 44px)
• single-column layout

High opening rate and success of the mailing campaign - summary

In conclusion, it is worth giving you one more piece of important information that will come in handy when you want to measure the success of your mailing campaigns. We are talking about the average open rate. For years, it has been in the region of 20%. It varies, of course, depending on the industry and the type of messages sent. If your emails do not currently reach the 20% threshold, it is worth following the advice in the article and working on the campaigns you send. Remember that the key to success is valuable, useful and distinctive content. However, you need to know how to encourage recipients to read it.