Average Email Open Rates By Industry + Email Benchmarks

Your marketing emails are only as good as the number of people who open them. However, knowing whether your emails are performing well enough can still be a challenge.

That’s why we’ve put together these industry-specific email benchmarks to help you gauge your email performance and optimize your strategies.

In this post, we’ll explore the average email open rates across various industries, key factors affecting these rates, and best practices to improve email open rates.

But first, we’ll take a quick look at how these metrics are calculated. If you want to skip ahead, just use the table of contents below.

What is email open rate in email marketing?

Email open rate is the percentage of recipients who open an email out of the total number of emails delivered.

This figure helps to measure the effectiveness of your email subject lines, sender reputation, and email timing.

Why is it important to monitor your email open rates? 

• Open rate indicates engagement: A high open rate shows that your emails are relevant to your audience, while a low open rate may indicate a lack of interest.
•  Affects overall email campaign success: If your emails are not opened, other metrics like click-through rate and conversion rate will suffer in return.
• Helps optimize subject lines: Open rates can help you test different subject lines to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

How to calculate email open rates

The email open rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique email opens by the total number of emails delivered, multiplied by 100.

Open Rate = (Unique Opens / Delivered Emails) x 100

For instance, if 1,000 emails were delivered and only 250 were opened, your email open rate would be: (250/1000)×100=25%

What is click-through rate (CTR)? 

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who click on a link within the email content.

Just like the open rate, CTR helps to measure engagement. A high CTR means recipients are highly interested in your content.

The CTR is calculated by dividing the number of unique link clicks by the total number of emails delivered, multiplied by 100.

CTR = (Unique Clicks / Delivered Emails) x 100

For instance, if 1,000 emails were delivered and 100 recipients clicked a link, the CTR would be:

(100/1000)×100=10%