Here are my Open Rates for Emails

I only measure click rate. I remove people who didn't click during the prior month.

The reason for this is improved deliverability with Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. All three seem to intermittently mark emails coming from a domain that sends to inactive accounts as spam and put them in the spam folder.

That is the reason I do it, but it also means that I have a very respectable open rate. The dead email addresses who no longer open my emals are removed and don't count the next month.

The other advantage of keeping a really clean email list is knowing your actual growth rate. If you don't clean your email list by eliminating the non-clickers, you can steadily grow to 100,000 names and find out that 90,000 of them are actually deal email boxes that have been abandoned. There is no bounce, but there is also no human at the other end of the line.

Cleaning monthly allows you to see your true growth rate.

The only list I have that has that kind of open rate is for my paid subscriber list. It consistently gets over 100% but what would you expect? They are paying for it.

If you are getting that high of an open rate (70%) on a regular double optin list, I MUST know your secret because that is almost unheard of.

Please? I am begging...

I'm impressed, I'm sitting around 30%

The click rates for my first 4 follow up emails are 21%, 79%, 72% and 15% (that last one is the one I really messed up, but I know how to fix it - just haven't got around to it yet)

The first one is the welcome email sent out immediately after they confirm, which gets opened at 82%, but I am guessing doesn't get read much?? Ideas? It is a pretty well written email - as good as 2 and 3, but the low click rate confounds me.

Secrets? Well, I always sweat over the small stuff like the subject line and the layout of the email so guess that could account for it. The content and subject matter is well loved too.

Those numbers seem very high. Here are some industry averages from MailChimp:

Email Marketing Benchmarks and Stats (Open Rates and Bounce Rates) | MailChimp.com

In general, I'm more concerned with click rate and sales tracking.

That's a great list - thanks.

Yep, they do seem high - in fact they blow the industry average out of the water according to your link!

Of course, my list isn't huge - only 1200 and growing, so these stats may not be particularly indicative long term. But this forum has kinda got me motivated to really look after this list!

In my main non IM niche, 20-40%.

IM niche, 10-20% if i'm broadcasting to all my lists. Have hit 35% when sending only to particular sections.

Hmmm, I am beginning to detect a little scepticism.

Those are some crazy opening rates!

It's funny because the other day I wrote a thread on how to increase open rates.

But I have never achieved anything close to what you are doing.

Come on, spill the beans!


Just kidding...

It's actually funny cos I genuinely started this thread hoping to get some tips on improving things!

A few people even seem to be skeptical that I am being truthful! ROFLAO

I don't really know what to say. I basically based my entire email strategy on link bait tactics.

spill spill spill... the mob is waiting and getting angry..... And you don't want to Anger the mob ;-)

When my list was small, the open rate was crazy high (60, 70, 80). As the list grew, the percentage went down. Now, it's anywhere from 17% to 35%, depending on the subject line. CTR is anywhere from 10% to 35%. (This is for a free newsletter.)

Suzanne