What Is The Average Email Open Rate?
By Anna Johnson on February 7th, 2010Silverpop’s 2009 International Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study provides some interesting open rate and clickthrough rate (CTR) benchmarks.
SilverPop examined 7,000 email messages generated by its clients in July 2009. The emails, which were sent by companies in a variety of industries, ranged from promotional emails to content-based newsletters.
Each message was delivered to a minimum of 50 recipients in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, with the average message sent to recipients in 28 countries.
Here are Silverpop’s findings in terms of open rates and ‘opens per opener’ (we’ll cover clickthrough rates (CTR) in an upcoming Kikabink News article):
1. Open Rate
The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open a given email. Silverpop calculated the open rate as the number of opened messages divided by the number of delivered messages.
Open Rate (Unique Opens)
- Average 22.20 percent
- Median 19.40 percent
- Top Quartile 28.50 percent
- Bottom Quartile 13.00 percent
Gross Open Rate (Total Opens)
Average 42.10 percent
Median 29.70 percent
Top Quartile 48.10 percent
Bottom Quartile 18.20 percent
2. Opens Per Opener
The Opens Per Opener metric reflects the number of times a recipient (or recipients, when the message is forwarded) opens the same message. Silverpop calculated the ‘Opens per Opener’ rate by dividing the total or gross measured opens by the number of unique opens.
Average Opens Per Opener
- Average 1.66
- Median 1.47
- Top Quartile 1.7
- Bottom Quartile 1.27
It’s important to note that open rates generally understate the proportion of email recipients that actually open and read your emails. This is largely because (a) today’s email readers – whether online email readers such as Gmail or software based email clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook – have image-blocking on by default, and (b) most people don’t bother loading images.
You’ll also find that the quality of your email list has a major impact on the level of your open rate. A list built via co-registration, for example, is likely to have a very small open rate compared with a list built via an optin form on your website.
What is more important than the actual open rate itself is the trend in the open rate. By keeping tabs on trends and variations in your open rate you can diagnose problems or identify winning subject lines. You can then take these into account in devising future email campaigns, newsletters and individual emails.
