Email marketing is undoubtedly the most effective of all online marketing tactics because it’s

• Cost effective / extremely low cost per contact
• Targeted
• Customisable and best of all
• Measurable

The issue that I’m concerned with is its measurability. Obviously for your email marketing campaign to be a success the messages you send need to be read. We can tell how may of the mails have been read (or at least opened) by looking at the open rate.
We call the number of emails that are opened in an email marketing campaign as a proportion of the total emails sent, the open rate.

Open rates are one of the greatest determinants of the success of an email campaign and it’s for this reason that the higher your open rate… the better. Unfortunately it is highly unlikely (read impossible) that you’ll ever get 100% of your recipients to open your emails. So what qualifies as a good open rate? Unfortunately there is no cast in stone standard as there are so many variables that contribute to a campaign’s open rate on any given day.

Open Rate Influencers include the source of your list, the nature of the email, the audience, the format, the reader’s email client, the time of day the mail was sent, whether the reader even wants to receive communication from you, how busy they are at that specific time of the day and even the day of the week.
I found an article by Mathew Patterson which features an interesting chart on open rate standards:


Patterson draws the following conclusions from the chart:

• As list size goes up, the open rate tends to fall; possibly because smaller companies are more likely to have personal relationships with their list subscribers.
• Companies and organizations that are focusing on enthusiasts and supporters, like churches, sport teams and non profits see higher open rates
• More specific niche topics, like some manufacturing areas also typically have higher open rates than emails on broader topics

He reckons that if your open rate is between 20 and 40% you are pretty much normal and if you’re hitting 50% you’ve done something very right.

Increasing your open rate
We’ve been performing split tests for one of our major travel clients for the last few months and the open rates for the same mail featuring different subject lines is astounding. Subject lines are just one way to test how you can increase your open rates. Looking at open rates on different days of the week and times of the day to see when your audience is most likely to open up and read your mails is another great way to heighten open rates.

In short there is no alternative to putting a lot of time and energy into testing and fine tuning your email marketing strategy - your open rates will improve and the results are well worth it.

Got any thoughts on open rates, testing or just life in general? I am always interested in hearing them.