How to calculate your email open rate (plus tips for improving it)

Email campaigns are a primary marketing technique used to communicate with potential and current customers. Successful campaigns keep active customers interested, reengage those who’ve stepped away from a brand, and bring in new leads.

An email’s open rate (how many people opened the message) is one of a handful of metrics marketers use to gauge campaign success. Understanding where this rate should be — and how to improve it — means you can make the most of these messages.

The impact of email open rates

When your email open rate trends upward, you’re gaining traction with your target audience and generating leads. If your rate declines, something isn’t resonating with consumers, and they’re losing interest. These trends give you vital clues about which strategies are working and which need rethinking.

Say you A/B test an email advertising an update to your time-tracking software. The first iteration includes a compelling subject line about exciting new features, plus brief preview text teasing the software’s retooled functionalities. The second version’s subject line is vaguer, and the preview text doesn’t mention new features. Instead, recipients must open the email to learn about the software’s updated value. If your open rate is higher for the first version than the second, you might rework subject lines and preview text across all email campaigns for increased engagement.

What’s a good email open rate?

According to Mailchimp, the average email open rate is 30–35%. Some industries, like sports and nonprofits, enjoy a higher average open rate of around 40%, but most sit near the 30% mark. Religious emails have the highest average rate (at 44%), and emails about electronics have the lowest (27%).

Here are some average email open rates across industries and niches:

• Religion: 44%
• Sports: 42%
• Arts: 42%
• Nonprofit: 40%
• Software and web apps: 28%
• Vitamin supplements: 27%
• Computers and electronics: 27%

How to calculate your email open rate

The platform hosting your email campaigns should have an open rate metric. For instance, in HubSpot, you’d click on the specific email to open the performance tab and see your open rate.

Here’s a formula to calculate the metric yourself:

Emails opened / (Emails sent – Bounces) x 100 = Open rate

First, subtract bounced emails from the total number of emails sent. You should try to eliminate bounces, but for now, just remove them so they don’t interfere with your calculation. Then, divide the number of emails opened by the total. Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage, and you have your open rate.

So, if you sent 1,000 emails and 40 bounced while 300 were opened, your calculation would look like this:

300 / (1,000 – 40) x 100 = 31.25%

How to use your email open rate

Your open rate provides valuable context about your campaigns’ successes and failures, as do unsubscribe and click-through rates. These three figures paint a detailed picture of how your audience receives your email marketing, and you’ll need all three to make data-driven decisions about future email marketing campaigns.

For example, if you have a 25% email open rate but only a 1% click-through rate, you know your email’s copy is bringing people in, but the call to action (CTA) isn’t convincing them to click through. Likewise, you know you’ve done something wrong if you have a 10% open rate and 1% unsubscribe rate. In that situation, only one in 10 people opened your email, and one in 10 of those did it to leave your mailing list entirely.

Observe the relationship between your open rate and other marketing metrics long enough, and you’ll notice patterns. You might discover that some email subject lines did well for getting people to open emails in one campaign, and a CTA got them to click through in another. With that information available, you’ll know how to design an email campaign that combines those two elements into one more successful attempt.

4 tips for increasing your email open rates

Your emails are just one of multiple touchpoints with your audience, but they’re vital to your brand’s success. Improving email engagement metrics translates to increased brand awareness because these metrics measure how many customers you’re reaching — and how many are engaging.

With that in mind, here are four tips for improving email open rates.

1. Craft compelling subject lines

An effective subject line is eye-catching and enticing without appearing spammy. Here are a few good rules to follow to increase opens:

• Include no more than two exclamation points
• Use sentence case
• Hint at something interesting to discover in the email
• Mention new features
• Use 30–50 characters

Here’s an example that puts these rules to use: “An exciting update is coming to your device!”

2. Fine-tune preview text

The preview text follows after the email subject line to give the reader a peek into the email’s content. Strong copy further entices the user to open your email.

Preview text should follow many of the same rules as your subject line but should be 50–90 characters long. For example, using the previous subject line example, a well-crafted bit of preview text might be: “Learn how these changes will affect how you use your device.”

3. Segment your audience and personalize content

More than ever before, personalized content is paramount in email marketing. Customers expect a touch of personalization in every interaction with brands, so you’ll need to meet that expectation to get your foot in the door. Fortunately, there are a couple straightforward ways to do this:

• Use variables that are replaced with users’ names, locations, and products
• Create separate versions of emails based on the products users own or how long they’ve been on your mailing list

4. Refine your email list

Maximizing email open rates starts with ensuring you have a quality mailing list. You want to contact people interested in your content, not send emails to those who always ignore them. Refining your email list ensures you’re reaching out to interested customers and keeping your costs low.

It might seem counterintuitive, but unsubscribes can help. Users who unsubscribe from your email list will no longer decrease your open rate. Don’t encourage readers to unsubscribe, but place a visible link in your email that lets them do so. Readers who want to unsubscribe will use it, and they’ll remember how convenient you made the experience for them.

Streamline your email marketing with Webflow

Boosting your email open rate requires a strategic email marketing campaign that encourages clicks, engages repeat customers, and generates quality leads. And the right email integration tools support campaign success.

Webflow integrates with email and marketing automation apps like Campaigner, which lets marketers and website owners engage with their audience by directly syncing customer contact information to their Webflow forms. You can also organize new email lists, customize message recipients, and filter out inauthentic contact information.

Discover other Webflow app integrations to automate and enhance your marketing efforts.