What does average open rate mean?
The term average open rate refers to the percentage of the emails that get opened from the total number you send out.
To find out what your average open rate is, you first need to figure out what your open rate is per email you send out. To do this, simply divide the total number of people who open each email by the total number of recipients. Once you have the open rate of each email you send out, simply average them all across all your email campaigns.
If you wish to learn more about this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: Is there an easier way to calculate my average open rate?
Yes! Fortunately, there is a big chance you would not have to do any calculations yourself. Most modern email marketing platforms make calculating your average open rate much easier using built-in tools that automatically track and compute all the necessary numbers for you.
Question #2: What is a good average open rate?
A good average open rate would ultimately depend on the industry you are in and the type of email campaigns you are running.
If you are doing a typical email marketing campaign, for example, 20%-25% would be a good number to shoot for, especially if you have an engaged mailing list. But if your campaign involves a lot of triggered emails via autoresponders, then you should aim for higher numbers because the recipient is already expecting to receive a message from you.
For a standard email marketing campaign, a good open rate benchmark is 20 percent. However, triggered emails and email autoresponders tend to have higher open rates because they are triggered by a user action.
Here’s a useful article from Campaign Monitor you can check with.
Question #2: Is it the same as the click-through rate?
No. The average open rate is not the same as the click-through rate.
As the name suggests, it only takes into account how many recipients, on average, open the emails you send out. The click-through rate, on the other hand—at least in terms of email marketing—refers to how many of the people who received your email clicked on a link in it.
Question #3: What is the difference between average open rate and click rate?
The main difference between average open rate and click rate is what they measure.
As we have seen in the preceding section, the former measures how many people open an email you sent out against the total number of people you sent it out to. The latter, on the other hand, measures how many people clicked on a link in an email you sent out against the total number of people who opened it.
At this point, you may be wondering: ‘doesn’t the click rate sound a lot like the click-through rate?’ That is a fair point. There is, however, one big difference between the two—which we will talk about in the next section.
Question #4: What is the difference between click rate and click through rate?
Even though they may seem the same—they both count the total number of clicks, after all—there is a big difference between click rate and click-through rate: what they measure the total number of clicks against.
As we have seen earlier, to get the click through rate, you need to divide the total number of people who clicked on a link in your email by the total number of people who opened your email. So, if 20 people opened your email and 10 of them clicked on a link in it, that is a 50% click-through rate (i.e., 10/20 x 100).
In contrast, you get the click rate by dividing the total number of people who clicked on a link in your email by the total number of people who received your email. So, if, say, 100 people received your email and a total of 10 people clicked on a link in it, your click rate is 10% (i.e., 10/100 * 100).