What Is a Good Open Rate for Email?

In digital marketing, email marketing metrics are crucial to understanding the functionality and relevance of emails in their modern context.

Their significance within advertisements and marketing cannot be overlooked, with a predicted 3.3 billion email users in the year 2023. We’ll demonstrate to you below the importance of a good open rate for email and how to effectively increase it.

What Is a Good Open Rate for Email?

It’s not easy to run an email marketing campaign with a high success rate. Statistically, the average email open rate is between 15 and 25%. Of course, the rates vary by industry.

An example of an excellent open rate for email would be the 125% increase recorded by media platform Morning Brew - a result of optimizing their mail advertising strategies.

Email Benchmarks by Industry 

An email benchmark refers to the criteria on which the success of online advertising (email) campaigns hinge. They are: 

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Click-open rate
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Email deliverability. 

The average email open rate benchmark for 15 different industries is highlighted below. Check them out to make relevant comparisons:

• Education: 23.40%
• Aerospace & Automotive: 12.60%
• Marketing & Advertising: 19.30%
• Financial Services: 20.20%
• Politics & Government: 30.50%
• Consumer Goods (Packaged): 14.50%
• IT & Tech: 17.60%
• Wholesale & Logistics: 18.90%
• Retail: 13.90%
• Nonprofit: 25.20%
• Design, Real Estate, & Construction: 19.90%
• Beverage &  Food: 13.00%
• Healthcare: 19.70%
• Publishing, Entertainment & Media: 18.10%
• Professional Services: 18.00%

As you can see, the industries with the lowest rates are professional services, beverages & food, and retail.

So, people are less likely to open an email about food than logistics. This could lead food retailers to consider other forms of marketing besides email marketing to create more meaningful brand awareness.

Day By Day Comparison

It might surprise you to learn that some days are better for email and content marketing than others. Here are the daily email open rates for all industries combined:

• Monday: 21.22%
• Tuesday: 21.26%
• Wednesday: 21.00%
• Thursday: 20.90%
• Friday: 21.10%
• Saturday: 17.50%
• Sunday: 17.90%

Best Days for Marketing 

From the above, it would appear that the average open rate for email is highest on Tuesdays, followed closely by Mondays. 

Furthermore, statistics show that the best email marketing average open rate regarding the time of day is between 10 am and 1 pm. It seems like people are more likely to read emails when they’re on a lunch break or just after they settle back down to work. 

Another interesting fact is that more than 20% of emails are opened within the first hour of delivery. After that hour, the number drops drastically to less than 1%.

Worst Days for Marketing 

Market research has shown that the worst days for this type of marketing are Saturdays and Sundays by at least a few percentage points.

Perhaps this is because most people are off work and engaged in other activities - away from the computer and emails.

On weekends, most people would rather take a break from work. At this time, the average individual is occupied with family or recreational activities. However, for certain industries, open rates for emails on weekends could prove to be worth it. This is mainly because the average person receives more mail on weekdays than weekends.

Thus, despite email marketing statistics indicating otherwise, you might be inclined to experiment with sending emails during the weekends. This way, you can take advantage of the reduced competition to reach your target market. 

Click-Through Rates by Industry 

Click-through rate is a distinct phrase in internet marketing. It calculates the number of clicks you get in a social media marketing campaign, on a particular ad, against the amount of impressions.

The average CTR (click-through rate) is between 2% and 5%. If an industry has a high average click-through rate, it means that people are more likely to click and open related ads. Here are some average email click-through rates for some major industries:

• Education: 3.00%
• Aerospace & Automotive: 2.80%
• Marketing & Advertising: 2.60%
• Financial Services: 2.50%
• Politics & Government: 4.10%
• Consumer Goods (Packaged): 1.60%
• IT & Tech: 2.50%
• Wholesale & Logistics: 2.20%
• Retail: 2.10%
• Nonprofit: 2.60%
• Design, Real Estate, & Construction: 3.10%
• Beverages & Food: 1.20%
• Healthcare: 2.70%
• Publishing, Entertainment & Media: 3.60%
• Professional Services: 1.80%

From the above, you can see that the email CTR average of industries involved with education, health, and government are among the highest.

Bounce Rate by Industry 

If your bounce rate is low, you need new marketing techniques. In simple terms, it’s the level at which your emails fail to deliver to the intended recipients, that is, your subscribers. 

These metrics can help you understand why your email campaign isn’t as effective as you expect when going through the average email bounce rate for various industries. 

There are two kinds - the soft and hard bounce. In the case of the former, the email fails to deliver because of a full inbox or server downtime. On the other hand, the latter occurs because of a wrongly-spelled email address or a suspended one. 

Here are some email industry benchmarks regarding bounce rates:

• Education: 1.10%
• Aerospace & Automotive: 0.80%
• Marketing & Advertising: 1.10%
• Financial Services: 1.20%
• Politics & Government: 1.30%
• Consumer Goods (Packaged): 0.40%
• IT & Tech: 0.90%
• Wholesale & Logistics: 1.20%
• Retail: 0.40%
• Nonprofit: 1.00%
• Design, Real Estate, & Construction: 1.40%
• Beverages & Food: 0.30%
• Healthcare: 1.00%
• Publishing, Entertainment & Media: 0.40%
• Professional Services: 0.80%

The average email bounce rate is 0.7%, with some of the lowest among the food, consumer goods, and automotive industries. The highest rates belong to wholesale & logistics, real estate, and financial services. 

Unsubscribe Rate by Industry 

The unsubscribe rate is the extent to which people click to do precisely that. It’s useful to monitor this aspect of your digital marketing campaigns. It can help you determine whether or not people find your content interesting and engaging. 

Below is the average unsubscribe rate benchmark for 15 different industries: 

• Education: 0.20%
• Aerospace & Automotive: 0.20%
• Marketing & Advertising: 0.20%
• Financial Services: 0.20%
• Politics & Government: 0.20%
• Consumer Goods (Packaged): 0.10%
• IT & Tech: 0.20%
• Wholesale & Logistics: 0.30%
• Retail: 0.10%
• Nonprofit: 0.20%
• Design, Real Estate, & Construction: 0.20%
• Beverages & Food: 0.10%
• Healthcare: 0.20%
• Publishing, Entertainment & Media: 0.10%
• Professional Services: 0.20%

The rate is relatively uniform across all industries without any significant differences.

Open Rate Best Practices 

With email open rates, you need to consider the specifics of all market segments to deliver value.

If you’ve had poor rates in the past, don’t worry! Here are some tips:

• When you get new contacts, email them within 24 hours
• Avoid overly lengthy emails; make them as concise as possible
• Use interesting subject lines
• Optimize your messages with preheader text as previews
• Create better messages by personalizing and dividing them into relevant segments
• Optimize your emails for phones - statistics say that 81% are opened via mobile

Click-Through Rate Best Practices

With this invaluable information, you’ll know the amount of visitors you’re getting on your website and which ones are converting. 

Below are some tips that will help boost your email click-through rate:

• Make sure that your content is relevant to your audience
• Make your CTA more attractive
• Provide your subscribers with incentive enough to grab their attention as soon as they open the email
• Make sure that your subject line corresponds with your email content
• Stay true to your brand voice
• Segment your subscriber contacts

Unsubscribe Rate Best Practices 

When considering the benchmark and overall email marketing statistics, it’s expected that a certain percentage of individuals will unsubscribe.

To some extent, consumer behavior regarding subscriptions relies on the strength of the commercial message. When you discover that your list is dwindling at an alarming rate, it’s time to reconsider your strategies.

You may want to do the following:

• Segment your mailing list more efficiently
• Offer your subscribers the option to customize email frequency
• Provide your subscribers with an alternative means of getting your content, e.g., via SMS, native advertising, affiliate marketing, referral marketing, and RSS feed
• Make sure your emails load quickly 
• Get feedback from those who unsubscribe
• Send your emails at specific times and not randomly

Bounce Rate Best Practices 

A bounced email does more than just affect your average email delivery rate - it’s not good for your reputation. Once your email bounce rates start getting up there, it’s time to consider some of the following steps:

• Cleanup your contact database
• Send your mails to a reduced contact segment
• Group your contact list into tiers based on engagement rates
• Avoid spamming
• Avoid purchased subscriber lists
• Don’t use free webmail addresses

Email Deliverability

This is simply, as the name implies, the ability to successfully send and deliver emails. Several factors affect average email deliverability, including click-through rate, campaign open rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate. 

If emails aren’t delivering for whatever reason, you can opt to use other means of marketing, such as: 

• customer referral programs
• behavioral targeting
• pay-per-click
• search engine marketing
• permission marketing
• paid advertising 

However, you can be unpleasantly surprised by the total cost per impression as they aren’t free.

You should consider implementing these strategies when your email deliverability rate is low:

• Ensure that your email domain is authenticated and verified
• Keep to genuine IP allocation
• Avoid spamming with subject lines 
• Check for loops in feedback
• Use confirmed or double opt-in emails
• Check blacklists

Wrap Up 

If you want to gain more control of your marketing strategy, you can use autoresponders. With them, your average email marketing response rates increase, which will, in turn, boost your email marketing click through rates. 

As an enterprise, you should focus on improving your B2B email open rates, not just campaigns to individuals. Knowing what is a good open rate for email and the average CTR are vital to the success of your marketing strategy. As long as you follow the techniques I’ve highlighted in this article, you can’t go wrong!