What is email open rate and why do you need it?

Are you sending emails to prospects and customers? If so, you need to learn more about the open rate.

This is a really important metric used to analyze the quality of your overall email marketing strategy.

The cool thing is that you can easily find this number in the Analytics tab of virtually every email marketing tool out there. HubSpot, Mailchimp, Sendinblue, ActiveCampaign... It doesn't matter which platform you're using, your email open rate is for sure hidden somewhere there ;)

Watch the video to learn more about what email marketing open rate means and why it's so important to your business.

Today we're going to talk about what is email open rate and why do you need it. It doesn't really matter which email marketing platform you're using to send emails to your prospects & customers. MailChimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Sendingblue...

There are so many different platforms nowadays. You're always going to have access to an analytics tab where you can see the performance of your email campaigns.

This is how it looks inside of MailChimp.

You have access to a tab that looks more or less like this, with the number for opens, and then you have a percentage. This is the open rate. The open rate is the percentage of people who open your email.

How does your platform calculate that this?

The formula for calculating the open rate.

Number of Emails opened / Number of Emails delivered = Open Rate

We get the number of emails opened and divided it by the number of emails delivered.

For example A thousand people get your email and 200 people open your email. What we have here is a 20% open rate. Okay? So emails opened, divided by emails delivered.

Now notice that I said emails delivered, not emails sent. In an ideal case scenario, if you're sending your email to a thousand people, a thousand people will receive your emails, right? But this is not always the case. Sometimes your emails bounce. When we are thinking about emails delivered this is the number of people who actually received your email in their inboxes. So, emails bounced would be outside of the calculation of email open rate.

Emails sent is the number of people that you send your email to.

Inside of MailChimp, you have access to a metric called bounced, which is really the number of emails that were bounced. Bounced emails are rejected by your contacts' email servers.

So consider this because every time we are looking at open rate, we are talking about emails delivered and not emails sent.

Now why is it important to look at email open rate in general?

A good open rate indicates that your email marketing strategy is good.

1. It means that you are sending relevant content to your audience.

2. Your subject lines are really good as well.

Because think about what is the most important thing that you look at before deciding if you're going to open an email or not? It's the subject line, isn't it?

You probably will also look at the sender name and email, but you primarily look at a subject line.

So essentially good open rates mean is that your subject lines are captivating and your email content overall is really good.