What is open rate?
Open rate is a term commonly used in email marketing that describes the percentage of recipients who open your email relative to how many have received it.
If you have an average open rate of 40%, this means that on average 40% of your recipients open your emails.
How do you calculate your open rate?
The open rate is typically calculated within the email marketing software you use — for example, in reports, a dashboard, or similar. Here you will usually be able to see both your average open rate overall, at campaign level, and down to specific emails.
If you wish to calculate your open rate manually, you can use the simple formula below:
Open rate in percent = Number of opened emails / (Number of sent emails - Number of bounces) * 100
An example could be that you have 30 opened emails out of 140 sent emails with 10 bounces:
30 / (150-10) * 100 = 20% open rate.
The reason you subtract bounces is that these never reach the recipient's inbox for one reason or another. Therefore, the intended recipient never had a chance to open your email and should not be included in your open rate, as this would be misleading.
What is a high and an average open rate for newsletters?
What constitutes a high and average open rate for newsletters depends largely on the individual case and includes:
- Industry
- Who your recipients are
- How many recipients you have
And similar factors.
The average open rate across industries is around 30%.
A high open rate is 40–50% or above.
We can help you with your open rate and email marketing
Would you like help increasing your open rate, CTR, and generally improving your email marketing? Learn more in our introduction to the benefits of email marketing or call us on tel. 30 12 42 72 and we will have a no-obligation chat!
