What is the average open rate for an email campaign

Action Rate Over Time: This metric monitors performance over time and tracks exactly when people are taking actions. Audience Size: This metric is all about tracking how many people have signed up to receive emails from you.

The larger your audience size, the more opens you can usually expect to receive. Click-Through Rate: The click-through rate of your email content measures the percentage of recipients who click on one of the links. Click-to-Open Rate: This one is a little different to a regular open rate because it compares the number of clicks to the number of opens. Conversion Rate: Your email conversion rate is arguably one of your most important metrics because it measures the percentage of email recipients who go on to take some sort of action, such as making a purchase.

Unique Open Rate: This metric looks specifically at how many unique audience members have decided to open the email. Unsubscribe Rate: This will follow the rate at which people opt out of your email list and indicate that they no longer want to hear from you.

In fact, if you spread yourself too thin and try to track too many marketing metrics, you risk overwhelming yourself and taking your eyes off the metrics that matter. Now that you know the basics about email marketing benchmarks, the next step is to understand the different factors which can affect your average email open rate.

A number of different factors come into play here, including:. List Quality: The quality of your list has a major role to play when it comes to your average email open rate. The more relevant your subscribers are to your company, the more likely they are to open the emails that you send to them.

Event Triggers: Many emails are automatically triggered by some sort of event, such as someone placing an order or signing up on a website. Brand Recognition: Brand recognition mostly comes into play for your sender name and email address, although consistent subject line styles can help too.

Subject Line Relevance: How relevant is your subject line both in terms of the email content and what your target audience is expecting to hear from you?

Relevance affects average open rates, but it also affects click-through rates and conversion rates. Sales CRM software. Customer service software. Content management system software. Premium plans. Operations software. Connect your favorite apps to HubSpot. See all integrations. We're committed to your privacy. HubSpot uses the information you provide to us to contact you about our relevant content, products, and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

For more information, check out our privacy policy. Written by Sam Cahoon. HubSpot also recommends upgrading your email signature using our free Email Signature Generator. Have you ever wondered how your email results compare to those in your industry? Or perhaps, what kind of open rates should you expect? Is your click rate above or below the industry average? Email deliverability is hard and there isn't always a good way to know how you are doing or how to improve.

This benchmark data is really valuable because it gives you a reference for how well you're doing — and some indication of how to improve. Email marketing benchmarks provide you with useful information about the health of your email sends. Benchmarks allow you to see how your specific campaigns compare to the standards of your individual industry Surprise!

Each industry has different benchmarks. In turn, you can discover opportunities to improve your email strategy and work on achieving even better results.

We analyzed the email metrics of 19, customers to calculate the open, click-through, hard bounce, and unsubscribe rates of each industry from November - November This data was pulled from individual accounts, and only those sending batch emails campaign.

This data only includes campaigns with over sends. Campaign Monitor built its benchmarks by analyzing over 30 billion emails sent by companies in over countries between January and December This adds another big wrinkle when trying to compare your business against the benchmarks, as you need to focus on location as well as industry. GetResponse collected its data from over four billion emails sent between January to June They only looked at active senders with at least 1, contacts.

The industries with the highest open rates were religion To collect its benchmarks, Constant Contact analyzed over million emails. The data is current through December HubSpot built its email open rate benchmarks by analyzing the data from 19, customers for batch email campaigns. Above, we told you that the overall average open rate is If your average open rates are above If your average open rates are below While you can see that there are some trends between different benchmark services e.

You want to see how you compare to the benchmark, so you go to Mailchimp and see that the overall is Instead, we just want to remind you that the most important benchmark is your own benchmark. So — how can you improve your own email open rates? Additionally, make sure to avoid words that will get you flagged for spam or the Gmail Promotions tab. You can also consider playing around with adding emojis in your subject lines.

For a deeper look, check out our full guide on how to write great email subject lines. All email clients display your subject line, but many email clients also give you a little bonus text — the preview text.

By default, email clients show the first sentence of your email. The time of day matters, too. Of course, this depends on your industry and target market. By breaking them into different segmented campaigns, you can send promotional emails that are relevant to each type of customer, which can boost your open rates. For more, check out our guide on how to use personalization in emails.

Both scenarios can lower your open rates. In general, sending an email somewhere between once a week and once per month is a good starting point, though it obviously depends on what you promised people when they signed up. Then incorporate that data into your next effort and into the day-to-day operations of your marketing.

Set goals, then measure them: Marketing goals are important. If you met them, great! If not, some tweaking is necessary. Setting goals and measuring them is simple—and it can provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a marketing plan.

Use different channels: While email lists are absolutely key to communicating directly with your customers, there are more marketing channels you can explore when it comes to building better relationships and improving response rates. Does your company sell ethically made makeup products? See about working with a beauty influencer on Instagram. Do you run a digital marketing agency? Try building a strong presence on Twitter and LinkedIn. Write a blog post that details something useful and position yourself as an authority on your product.

Another good way to check how well your emails are working is to take a look at the click rates. The click rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered emails got at least 1 click.

This number shows whether or not your audience finds the emails you send relevant enough to click through and check their email for more. Your click rate essentially tells you how many of your subscribers find your campaign content useful. To improve your click rate, you'll need to create content that's useful to more subscribers.

Like open rates, you can sometimes accomplish this by targeting specific content to a smaller, segmented audience. Make links more effective: Best practice suggests avoiding the generic phrase "click here" as click-through text. Many people won't click it because it's unclear where it goes. It also leaves out important information screen readers need for disabled users, and suggests clicking a mouse, when a lot of people view their emails on a touchscreen. Make your link text descriptive and concise, and point the click-through URL to the most relevant information available.

If you're referencing a particular service, send the link directly to that service's webpage instead of your business homepage. Embed more links: Some users have success with including multiple links to the same content in a single campaign. This is particularly helpful for campaigns with a single call to action, such as prompting your subscribers to donate.