Improving email open rates

June 2009

One of the best ways to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns is to record:

how many people open each of your emails; and
how many proceed to click on something once they have.

You can use open rates and clickthrough rates to benchmark one email against another, or against the industry average.*

Recently we sent a newsletter to two different audiences in two separate mailings. The first mailing, which we sent to new contacts, got an open rate of 54% and clickthrough rate of 53%. The second, which we sent to lapsed contacts, got an open rate of 22% and a clickthrough rate of 50%.

There are a few things we can learn from this experiment:

Keep going

If you neglect your prospects, they start to forget about you. More people might have opened the second mailing if they still recognised the sender name. Also, if they don’t remember you, they might not like receiving your email.

Cleanse your data

If someone doesn’t want your emails, make sure it’s easy for them to unsubscribe or manage their preferences. And if they no longer use their email address, take them off your mailing list. These simple measures will make sure they don’t get annoyed, block you, or drag down your open and clickthrough rates. Focus on your active subscribers instead.

Cleansing data is easy. With our email marketing software we can show you how to remove bounced emails automatically.

Be relevant

Fewer lapsed contacts than new contacts opened the email, but the percentage that clicked through after opening was almost the same. This suggests the content, once people actually saw it, was just as interesting to both audiences.

As long as your emails are relevant, you will succeed in engaging people. That’s why we use software that lets you choose which stories to send to each of your audiences.

Test, test, test

Controlled experiments such as ours can help you to figure out why a certain audience isn’t opening your email, clicking on your stories or taking you up on your offers. You can improve your open rates by addressing these problems.

* The average open rate for B2B newsletters is currently 23% and the average clickthrough rate is 4%, according to the index that we track.

Read more:

Back to stuff