How To Have World-Class Email Open Rates

3 Best Practices

Published in

Small Business Forum

5 min readOct 26, 2016

Emailing is probably one of the most important marketing channels in any company. It’s an amazing channel for many reasons, and mainly because it can have a very positive ROI. Neil Patel wrote in his blog that it is estimated you get a $39.40 return on every $1 invested into email marketing.

But before being very profitable with emailing, the first step is to have a good open rate. Even though it seems pretty obvious, let’s remind everyone what the open rate is. I found a good definition on campaignmonitor.com « Open rate is a measure of how many people on an email list open (or view) a particular email campaign. The open rate is normally expressed as a percentage ».

Here is how it is calculated:

First things first: What is a good open rate?

Like any marketer talking about any marketing topics, I’ll answer to that by saying « it depends ». It depends on your industry and the quality of your email lists. But let’s say you didn’t buy your email lists — don’t ever, ever, do that; no one is going to sell you the magical list of people, who always open emails from people they never heard of and buy anything that is being promoted to them. Oh, and it’s the same with that list you got for free from your cousin, who is selling drone-delivered rainbow detox smoothies on the web — don’t ever try to use that.

That being said, let’s say you grew your lists thanks to great landing pages, where you explained what people can expect from leaving their email addresses, or whatever other « healthy » methods you can think of. Basically, you have qualitative lists.

Now you can (approximately) know what a good open rate is in your industry, by checking mailchimp’s industry average open rates.

Though, don’t get obsessed with this, it is an average. You definitely shouldn’t aim to be in the average. I find those figures to be quite low actually. But that must be because the majority of marketers underestimate the potential of emails, so they don’t spend enough time on crafting their campaigns, and thus, they are quite bad at optimizing for email opens.

In my previous job, the industry average was around 23% and I was very angry when I didn’t make it to at least 35% (which was approximately our average). You should always try to improve your open rate.

So what are the best practices?

1. Have a killer subject line

Probably the most important part as it is the first thing your recipients will see. To have a great subject line you need to:

make it short and straightforward: HubSpot recommends 6 to 10 words, and says it can be a question or a statement
your recipients should understand what your email is going to be about: don’t try to fool them or they’ll never open an email from you again
avoid salesy language such as « free »
try to personalize it when appropriate
try to be creative! Your recipients receive your emails, but tons of others too. Your subject line has to stand out. Test things even though it may look too simple! I’ve reached a steady 80% open rate with the subject line « [name of the company] thanks you :) ». The conversion rate (filling a feedback form) for that same campaign was 33%. Those 3 words with an emoji were better than many 6 to 10 words subject lines. Try things.

2. Choose the appropriate name and email address

In its email marketing certification (that I recommend to anyone if you want to go further into email marketing), Hubspot recommends:

to always use a company address (not a free webmail account)
to use an address that indicates the purpose of the send: for instance, use careers@company.com instead of info@company.com to give a heads up about applications
to define who the email comes from depending on the customer lifecycle: for instance, use your company name if the email is going to be sent to a new lead as he may not know anyone in the company
not to send emails from no-reply: sending from a no-reply is like killing the purpose of emails. You send emails to have a one-on-one conversation with your recipients!

3. Craft your preview text wisely

The preview text is like a snippet of your email. You should try to tease the content of your email in that preview. Again, try to be creative, and try things! The more you try, the more you learn.

This is it.

These are the best practices to make it from a below-average open rate to a world-class one. Of course, many other things will come into play such as the frequency of your email campaigns, the quality of your lists… And I will talk about it in further articles.

A last important point

I advise you to think about the subject line, the name and email address and the preview text once you have finished your email copy! So first, create your email copy, and then follow these best practices. Before creating any email, you should ask yourself 5 very important questions (a.k.a The Five Ws), and I talk about this in that other article. So go check it out, it’s a quick 5 min read that will probably help you a lot!

I hope you learned something and I’m looking forward to sharing some more email marketing tips with you!