What is a good open rate?

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A colleague of mine who is starting a small online media business recently sent out an email campaign. He got a 30% open rate on the email which prompted him to ask me, "is that a good open rate?" It's a question that both new and experienced email marketers deal with. So what is a good open rate for email campaigns?

The answer is there is no easy answer. There are a lot of factors involved that you have to consider.

Across all industries and email programs, a baseline average open rate is between 12.5% verses against emails delivered. When you break those out by industry, the numbers change dramatically:

These numbers also change based on the type of communication sent (transactional, promotional, or informative). So you have to take some caution when comparing your open rates to benchmarks across industries or even within your own industry. For instance, one retailer's promotional emails run open rates of 40% or more because of how engaged their audience is; so it wouldn't be fair to compare yourself to them if you were in the same industry.

The best measure of your success is to compare your opens against the own historical performance of your list. You know best the composition of your list, and what sort of performance you should expect from your list as far as opens and clicks. Take your data for the previous quarter, and use that as your benchmark for your current quarter's email.

Using your own historical data as a benchmark will also help you in better determining where you're improving and what is helping to drive better reposes within your own list. You easily be able to see how your efforts are directly impacting your success, better than comparing to a possibly skewed industry standard.