Email open rate handbook - Get your emails opened

The first step to outreach success is getting your emails opened.

You could have written the best outreach campaign of all time, but it’s worthless if nobody sees it.

That said: open rates are often inaccurate and no longer one of the most important email deliverability metrics.

Still, it’s important to know:

• ➡️ What email open rate is
• ➡️ Whether open rates still matter
• ➡️ What a good open rate is
• ➡️ And how to improve your open rate (or opens)

We’ll discuss all below. ⬇️

What are email open rates? 🤷‍♀️

The email open rate is the percentage of opens you get for an email.

Ideally, it’s calculated with unique opens since a single recipient can open an email multiple times.

The open rate used to tell you whether your emails were actually getting through to your leads.

Unfortunately, big email service providers like Gmail have made it hard to accurately track opens, meaning your open rate can be either inflated or deflated.

So, how’s open rate calculated?

Email-sending tools usually calculate your open rate for you, but the math is simple:

You just divide the number of (unique) opens by the number of emails sent.

👉 If you want a more detailed explanation of open rates, check out our post on what an email open rate is and how to calculate it.

Do open rates matter?

As mentioned above, open rates are no longer accurate.

The main problem can be found with the tracking pixel responsible for tracking opens. There are two main issues with it:

• The tracking pixel doesn’t get loaded due to email client or email service provider configuration. If it doesn’t get loaded, no opens will be tracked.
• The tracking pixel gets preloaded even for emails that haven't been opened. When this happens, the email will register as being opened regardless of whether the recipient actually opens it.

For example, Apple Mail's Mail Privacy Protection allows users to turn off open tracking.

Since all of an email’s content is preloaded, including the tracking pixel, all emails sent to Apple Mail accounts with this feature enabled will register as opens—even when no one ever opens the email.

Needless to say, this will skew the open rate data.

So, should you care about open rates?  No. Keep them as a side stat, but use other metrics to measure your outreach success.

Target open rate: What to aim for 🎯

The average open rate for cold email is unclear.

Different numbers can be found on different websites.

Some claim 25% is good (nah!), while others boast open rates of 60% or more.

It all depends is the most sensical and most annoying answer at the same time.

If open rates were reliable, we’d say anything above 50% is acceptable. For now, our best advice is to use other metrics to measure your engagement, like reply and click-through rates.

👉 Further reading: What is a good open rate?

How to boost your open rate 🚀

Even though open rates are not reliable anymore…

It doesn’t mean you can completely neglect them.

You still have to follow the same best practices to increase deliverability and opens, even though you can’t directly measure their impact.

You must take care of:

• ➡️ Your sender reputation: Your reputation is non-existent for a new domain, and you must slowly build it up using a warm-up service like lemwarm.
• ➡️ Your technical setup: Email authentication protocols can add a layer of security to your emails. Subsequently, Internet service providers will love this and give your emails better inbox placement.
• ➡️ Your list hygiene: Send only to verified emails and weed out bad leads from your list (i.e., bounces and unopens).

👉 Further reading:  How to improve your email open rate - 5 factors to consider

Email open rate FAQ

What's the difference between unique opens and total opens?

Unique opens is the superior stat. Total opens are all opens for an email, including multiple opens from the same person. Your email-sending tool should use unique opens as the main stat for open tracking.

Should I be concerned if my email open rates are low?

Even though open rates are now inaccurate, you should still be somewhat concerned. Open rates can be both inflated and deflated, so a low open rate does suggest that your emails are not getting opened as much.

How can I track and measure email open rates effectively?

This is no longer possible due to policy changes by big email service providers. However, most email-sending tools still track open rates, so they are your best bet.

What other metrics should I consider apart from email open rates?

Reply rate (how engaging are your emails?), click-through rate (if your emails contain links), conversion rate (are your emails converting into meetings booked or sales?), bounce rate (bounces can hurt your deliverability), and spam complaint rate (the lower, the better - try to keep it under 0.3%)