What are good email open and click-through rates? Plus, learn how to increase yours

Maybe your open rate averages 20%, but your competitors’ emails gain much more traction. Or perhaps your click-through rates outperform everyone else!

In this article, we’ll zoom in on two popular email metrics: Open rate and click-through rate. We’ll share industry averages from our own comprehensive research so you can compare and see where you stand. And if you realize your email statistics aren’t up to par, just follow the best practices. Your path to success starts here!

Email open rate measures the percentage of recipients who open your email campaign. When someone opens your email, it suggests that the subject line caught their attention and the email topic interests them. The higher the email open rate, the better.

You can calculate your email open rate by dividing the total unique opens by the total recipients and then multiplying the answer by 100 to get a percentage. A unique open is the number of individual subscribers who opened your email. Even if the person opens your email several times, it counts as a single open.

You should also first deduct hard and soft email bounces from the total recipients. These emails failed to deliver, so it makes sense to leave them out of the equation.

While it’s good to know how to calculate your email open rate, most email service providers (ESPs) automatically work out the open rate for each email campaign. In MailerLite, open rates are shown in your dashboard and reports. Easy-peasy!

In 2023, we analyzed over 764,000 email marketing campaigns as part of our annual benchmark study. Across all industries, the average open rate for email was 41.31%.

For those who Googled “Is 50% open rate good for email,” congratulations (we see you in the search queries)! 

If you have low open rates, don’t freak out! First, not all industries perform this well, and second, we’ll teach you open rate optimization strategies further down this article.

Our 2023 email marketing benchmarks show the open rates for different industries ranged from 32.02% to 46.94%. Try to optimize your average open rate to sit within this range, or above.

Government (46.94%) and medical, dental, and healthcare (46.67%) crowned the list with the highest open rates. Non-profits followed as a close third (46.49%). The industry with the lowest open rates was games, with an industry average of 32.02%.

Now for the million-dollar question: How can I improve my email open rate? We live and breathe email and digital marketing, so we’ve got a few tried-and-tested tactics for you.

Step 1. Find the perfect email subject lines

The subject line is arguably the deciding factor for why people do or do not open your email. So when creating campaigns, here’s where you want to spend a good chunk of your time.

Play around with emojis, length, wording, and calls to action. Then A/B test different subject line versions in (ideally) each email campaign. The test results give you valuable insights on what allures your subscribers to open emails. And don’t forget to customize the email preheader as well, it’s often a forgotten email marketing strategy.

Step 2. Send personal messages to your email list

Each person on your email list has different habits, interests and needs. The more you can play into people’s individual interests, the higher your email open rate will be. People love getting messages that feel like they’re crafted specifically for them.

With email segmentation, you categorize recipients based on characteristics so you can send personalized messages to smaller groups. It takes as much effort to do this for 200 as for 200,000 email subscribers. Small effort, big results!

Step 3. Deliver emails at exactly the right time

Yes, it’s possible to deliver emails at the best time for each recipient. And no, you don’t have to send every single email manually. All thanks to AI.

MailerLite’s Smart sending feature uses AI to automatically deliver emails based on when a prospect is most likely to engage. The more you use this email feature, the more data is collected and the more accurate your results will be. You’ll never have to guess the best time to send a message, you’ll know.

Step 4. Manage email list subscribers regularly

Even in email marketing, regular check-ups are necessary. Schedule some time to see which recipients are active, and which have not shown much engagement lately. Reengaging or removing subscribers who don’t open your emails will give your open rate a boost.

For inactive recipients, you could create a win-back message to reignite their interest in your content. You can also unsubscribe contacts who haven’t engaged with your promotional emails for a certain period of time. This might sound like a loss, but you’ll win by achieving higher open rates. Lastly, it’s important to periodically verify whether contacts are still opt-in and valid.

Step 5. Send unread emails again

How many emails are unopened in your mailbox right now? If you’re anything like the average human, the answer is a lot. Sometimes messages are overlooked. This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s not interested. It could be that the email got lost in the sea of messages.

Auto-resend campaigns help by automatically sending a follow-up message to people who didn’t open or click on your first message. This is an easy way to get far more eyes on your content.

The CTR shows how many people clicked somewhere after opening the email. This percentage is a good indicator of how relevant or interesting your email content is. It also gives you good insights into how well your call-to-action placements worked.

To know the percentage of people who clicked at least one link in your email, we need to divide the total number of email recipients who clicked by the total emails delivered. The delivery number excludes emails that bounced.

Our 2023 benchmark report showed that the average industry-standard click rate of emails is 3.01%. This is a slight decrease from the 3.36% average click-through rate we measured in 2022.

Bloggers performed best with an average email click rate of 5.25%. This could be because emails from bloggers are often packed with links to articles. The industry with the second-highest click-through rate was religion, with 5.11%.

Don’t get discouraged if your email click rates are lower. Or much lower, like the software/app and business/finance industries. They hovered around the 1% mark but had respectable open rates, indicating that while their emails gained traction, their content just might be less clickable.

Now that engagement is at an all-time high, we’re moving to the next challenge: How can we get people to take more action inside your emails? Follow these 5 steps to get recipients to click more and boost the effectiveness of your email campaigns!

Step 1. Craft a great call to action

One way to improve your click-through rates is through your call to action (CTA). It’s the email element that encourages people to buy, sign up, read the article, or take the action you want them to take.

Writing effective CTAs is an art form in itself. Improve your CTA with good writing, clear objectives, strategic placements, and an enticing offer. Like subject lines, the way to master this craft is to experiment and test, often. It’s the only way to know what makes your audience tick… we mean, click!

Step 2. Keep readers engaged inside the email

Grabbing someone’s attention is one thing, keeping it another. People disengage when you don’t put effort into the conversation, and it’s the same with email marketing.

So, how can we keep emails engaging? A great option is to embed interactive content. We’re talking email surveys, polls, quizzes, and RSVPs. It’s fun for readers and helps you to get to know your target audience better.

Step 3. Discover people’s preferences with A/B tests

How well do you know your email subscribers? You might have a hunch of what attracts the people on your email list to your content, but the only way to know for sure is by asking them. And the easiest way to “ask” is through A/B testing.

For your next campaign, send two (or more) versions of an email and watch people’s behavior. You might find that emojis perform better. Or short email copy. Or bigger buttons. People will tell you what they prefer best, and if you listen and tweak accordingly, your email CTR will significantly improve!

Step 4. Make your emails shareable

Word of mouth is a marketing tale as old as time! If people are excited about something, they want to share it with their friends. The same goes for your email newsletters.

There are a few ways to incorporate social media and make your emails shareable. You can embed social posts, add social buttons in the footer or make your newsletter shareable beyond email. The last option increases visibility and can help you to achieve better email click rates.

Step 5. Create personal emails for everyone

A personal note makes people feel special, which makes them like you more, which results in more engagement and higher conversion rates. But it takes time to tailor messages—which is why most email marketers don’t bother. Unless you’re working with an email platform like MailerLite. 

With placeholders, you can easily send emails with personal touches at large. You can use placeholders for recipients' names as well as their hometowns, birthdays, or even their favorite colors. The options are infinite. Discover what’s possible in the article below.

Time to experiment with your email campaigns

We gave you a lot, didn’t we? As email marketers, we’ll forever be tweaking and testing, but that’s what makes it so fun!

Let yourself be surprised by the results of an A/B test, spend an afternoon brainstorming catchy subject lines, or implement a poll to learn new things about your recipients.

Hopefully, your email open and click-through rates were on par with the industry averages, or even better! And if they weren’t, they will be after you implement some (or all) of the steps mentioned. 

Remember: The more you know your audience, the better your click-through rates and email open rates will be. So whatever strategy gives you deeper insights into your audience, start there!