Your Average Email Open Rate.

I don't track or test open rate because that requires HTML emails. HTML emails have a much lowere CTR and an even lower action rate after the click through. This is a case where testing actually kills your sales because the test itself is too intrusive.

I do track click through rate. Here are my live stats:

Case Study: Headline Click Through Rate

You can't click if you don't open, so you can assume that my open rate is at least the same and probably greater than my click through rate.

Yes. Of course it is true. More and more people are accessing the web using devices that can't process HTML email at all (such as cell phones).

Other people have HTML email turned off for security reasons (I do).

Others allow HTML email, but block detected bugs (the little 1x1 pixel graphics usually used to detect the open).

The technology for even reliably detecting open rate is very flawed. And it means that you are keeping some people who want to read your email from being able to read it on their email reading device. That's not good business.

Besides, the only metric we all really care about is income. We track sales because it takes 30 days to get a monthly income statement. We track subscribes when we are starting out and don't have the sales data we need yet... and when we want to look for improvement in something before the sales have started. The subscribes will go up and generally any particular web-site will have a particular subscribe to sale ratio that is fairly predictable.

When we don't have enough traffic to track subscribes or we want data even faster than the subscribes are happening, we might track clicks on web-site links.

As we back up in the process even more, we might want to track something in the emails before our visitors even make it to our site. The click through rate in the email is good for that.

The open rate is the step before the click through rate. It would only be useful if we couldn't get clicks on links in the emails fast enough for analyzing the data and making positive changes.

But since you can't take an order in an email, the job of an email is to get them to your site or to call your 800 number or however you take orders.

That means the job of an email is to get them to click through to your site. A properly designed emails focuses on that and you see an almost 100% open to click through rate because there really isn't anything for your reader to do except to click.

And the click through rate is 10-20% so why would you need to track the open rate which is probably only 10.2-20.3%? There really isn't any reason to track the open rate. It isn't a lot higher than the click through rate so you won't get data any faster by using this metric. And it is very unreliable because of how open rate is detected. And by even implementing that metric and trying to measure it, you are limiting the number of people who can even read your email.

Hi Gav,

I have being following this guy by the name of Terry Dean and he wrote something about Email Open Rate that may interest you. Terry is a well known GURU ( I call him that) that teaches businesses on how to do well with email marketing.

Here is the article that he wrote. It is very interesting:

Open This Email : Internet Business Coaching by Terry Dean

Enjoy reading.

Tal

Now, some of the providers will give you intel on that. 10-15% is good.

That being said... as some folks posting here have said... it is inaccurate. It is my understanding that you have to have an image in an e-mail to test open rates... it's VERY inaccurate.

I don't worry about open rates. I worry about click-thru on my desired links. And, I really don't see that html does any worse than text. In fact, over time, I think it has improved. But, it's all about testing. And, it depends on the market.

I've found that the more targeted the email subject is to the offer that got someone to sign up to my list in the first place, the higher the open and click-through rates tend to be. When I stray a bit in order to offer my list something I've put out that is only marginally related, it drops significantly.

Closely related = about 40% open; 30% click-through
Marginally related = about 25% open; 8% click-through

John

With a tightly focused NON-IM newsletter we operate, the average open rate is just over 70%.

The CTR varies between 15% to 25%.

Just to note, our subscribers are not the typical IM "sign up to 108 ezines in one week" crowd. Our niche is not exposed to significant amounts of online marketing, hence the higher Open and CTR.