Open Rate

What It Is: The percentage of email recipients who open a given email.

Most email marketers are still bent over backwards trying to optimize their subject lines for higher open rates. While this can have a positive impact — and more opens are a great thing — they really should be focused on optimizing their clickthrough rates, instead.

The fact of the matter is that open rate is actually a very misleading metric for a few reasons. Most importantly, an email is only counted as “opened” if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message. And a large percentage of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email client. This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate, making it an inaccurate and unreliable metric for marketers, as it underreports on your true numbers.

How valuable is your email open rate?

You can get some value out of open rate as a metric if you use it as a comparative metric. For instance, if you compare the open rates of this week’s email send to last week’s email send (both to the same lists) it might give you some insight since the variables are somewhat controlled.

The average open rate for “cold” B2B email campaigns is 8-10% (source: Business Wise results). In email marketing, it’s critical to maintain realistic expectations about results. If you’re expecting the majority of your emails to be opened and read, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. With cold email open rates around 10%, repetition and consistency are key. People are busy and inboxes are cluttered, so even the best emails get overlooked. Email regularly to maximize opens, clicks, and leads, and always test to determine what works best.