Opening rate / open rate

When you send out newsletters and transactional emails, it's usually to get them read. So ideally, you want as many people as possible to open your emails. But this is far from the case. The word "open rate" means what percentage of people open your emails. It's called "open rate" in English, in case you've read anything about open rates in English.

To take a concrete example, let's assume you send out 1000 emails to your email list. 230 people open this email and you have an open rate of (230/1000)*100 = 23%.

How do you measure open rate?

The most common way to measure the open rate is to measure whether people view the images you have in your email. In other words, see if the image is viewed. But there are still users who don't allow images to be shown in their emails. And you can't measure those users. We don't know how many of them there are. But it's probably not very many. Besides, you can measure that they have opened the email if they click on a link in it.

What is a good open rate?

The short answer is 100% or thereabouts. But that's a pretty stupid answer. But it's pretty good.

The problem is that it's very hard to compare. It's like saying "what's a good time in a marathon?". For the world's best runners, it's not 3 hours. But for the average Dane, running a marathon in 3 hours is really great.

It's a bit the same with emails. If you've just started your email list and have 30 readers on it (one of which is your mom), you can probably get an open rate of 80-90%.

If you have a 12-year-old list with 45,000 recipients, you should probably only expect an open rate of 10-20% - and 10% of 45,000 readers is still 4,500 readers opening your emails - which is pretty good.

So you shouldn't really compare your open rate with others. But compare it to yourself from one campaign to the next.

How to increase your open rate

It's hard to answer, but there are some basic things you can at least take care of.

Firstly, you should have SPF set up, which helps mail servers verify that your emails come from you and thus get through the spam filters. If you end up in the spam folder, the chance of your email being opened is very small.

Next, make sure you write about what you promised your recipients you would write about. If your recipients signed up for a newsletter about menswear and then you change your store to something about interior design, you can expect more and more people to unsubscribe and not open your emails. So make sure you meet your readers' expectations - or align expectations so to speak. This increases the chance that your open rate will increase.

Another important factor is that you need to write a subject line that your readers find interesting enough to open the email.

For example, if you write "Newsletter from Webshop, March 2020" as the subject line, it's not very interesting. But if you write "What happened?" or "Michael, this offer (half price) expires tonight at 11pm", then there is a slightly higher chance of them opening the email. So, to get a higher open rate, you need to put some effort into the subject line.

One of the well-known tips for a higher open rate is to write your recipient's first name in the subject line. However, this is something you should definitely not overdo. We Danes generally don't like our first name being used too much for this kind of thing.

Another well-known tip is to use emojis in the subject lines. Hearts, stars, a rocket, a smiley face... especially because they are colored on smartphones and thus stand out more. It's probably important to know your target audience. If you sell measuring equipment to the offshore industry, emojis may not be the right tool to pull out in the quest for higher open rates.

The last dirty trick to be mentioned here is one we wouldn't recommend using. But it works. It's simply writing "Re: " in front of your subject line. This makes it look like you're replying to a message from your recipient (which you're not). But we've gotten used to a reply containing "Re:" in the subject and then we respond to it. Or users think "I don't remember sending that email, what is it?". When they open the email, they realize they've been tricked and it leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth.

By making your emails relevant, you can increase your open rate. Some Shoporama merchants have used it in their transactional emails. For example, if a user has looked at the product "Mares blue snorkel set" but didn't buy it, you can send an email a few hours later with "Hey - Mares blue snorkel set is still in the basket". This resulted in a really good open rate.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.