What is a good email open rate?

Email outreach success all starts with getting your emails opened.

No opens = no conversions.

So no wonder that many email marketers obsess over their open rate.

But what exactly is a good open rate?

Let’s see if we can find a good answer.

The average email open rate

According to Constant Contact open rate data, the average open rate is just 36.48%.

Note that this data includes a range of different niches and email marketing methods.

If this seems low, it’s because it is.

Does this mean that anything above 37% is a good open rate?

We don’t think so.

You can do much better than 37%.

If only 37 out of 100 recipients open your email, then much of your work is for nothing

Here’s what you should aim for 🎯

Anything under 50% is unacceptable.

If you’re finding more leads who never open your email than leads who do, then most of your efforts are in vain.

That’s why you should aim for 50% at minimum.

However, with the right strategy, you could go much higher than that.

Here’s a recent open rate of ours. Yes, very few emails were sent. But it shows what is possible.

Are open rates even reliable? 🤷‍♂️

Open rates have gotten a lot of stick recently.

Because of policy changes, Google and Apple have made it harder to accurately track opens.

It’s spurred some email marketers to use other metrics to track success, like reply rate or click-through rate.

But those stats don’t tell the whole story.

For now, open rates are still a decent metric to use, especially if you send out many emails. In a big dataset, inaccuracies could get evened out.

How can I improve my email open rate? ⏫

Open rates are still important.

And with the right approach, you can boost them significantly.

Some steps to take are:

• Warming up your email
• Having a deliverability work behind the scenes to improve your deliverability
• Completing your technical setup
• Not sending to unverified emails
• Not sending spammy content

For more detail, check out our guide on how to improve open rates.