Why Open Rates Matter

Updated: April 13, 2022

Do you have any idea what your open rates are for your email marketing campaigns? And do you know why open rates matter? If your answer is “no”, well, you should, and we’re going to tell you why.

Why Open Rates Matter: To put it simply, we need to know how many of our subscribers are actually opening our messages. In other words, when you send a mailing out what percentage of the people to whom you send that mailing actually open the email?

Depending on your industry, if you are seeing an open rate around 20% or better, you are experiencing a pretty good open rate. This surprises a lot of folks new to email marketing who believe that every message they send will (or should) get opened. But here are the facts about why your messages may not be getting opened:

Your message might be going in to the spam, junk, or promotions folder.
They may not remember requesting it. They could have deleted it, or ‘spammed’ it (clicked “this is spam”)
They may remember requesting it, but simply don’t want it now and so ‘spammed’ it without opening it
They never requested it, and so ‘spammed’ it without opening it. (If you use TrafficWave, this isn’t even a possibility due to our double opt-in system)

Again … Most legitimate email marketers using best practices are seeing open rates around 20% (give or take).

So here is why we track the details and why open rates matter:

If your open rate is too low, you are missing out on sales and engagement opportunities.

If your open rate is within range, you want to see what you can do to beef that open rate up.

This last is an important point, particularly if you are in email marketing, or if you are otherwise sending out mass mailing for which you are hoping to induce the recipients to take some sort of action: if they don’t want what you’re selling, you are wasting your and their time, and you are wasting money.

A big reason why open rates matter:

Inbox providers and ISPs track your open rates.

That’s right. The inbox providers and ISPs monitor your open rates. And guess what: if your email isn’t getting opened, you’re going to start going to the spam folder. The way the ISPs and inbox providers look at it is this: if your recipients don’t want your email, then the ISP isn’t going to clutter up their inboxes with it.

Inbox providers and ISPs generally want to see an average open rate, consistently across time, of at least 20% or more in order to keep putting your email in the inbox, otherwise they will start putting your email in the spam folder, and if your open rate goes too low, and stays too low (in the single digits) they may even start rejecting email from you.

Our advice: Start tracking your open rates. Take action to get it up if the rate is low. If you are within that 20% area, take steps to see if you can get it even higher. Your business will thank you for it.

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