What is a good open rate for your email newsletter?

http://www.launchbit.com/blog/what-is-a-good-open-rate-for-your-email-newsletter/

by hippo33 • 14 years ago

41 38 14 years ago

petercooper8• 14 years ago

I run four weekly e-mail newsletters dedicated to programmers (in the JS, Ruby, HTML5, and 'general' spaces) with a total circulation of around 80,000 and Launchbit occasionally sells ads for me (though I'm doing more direct now, it seems).

My long term average open rates are 50.6%, 54.2%, 52.5% and 58.1% respectively - that's for weekly, curated news. They certainly drop a little over time and I've discovered two of the key reasons so far: people skipping some weeks due to e-mail overload and increasingly strict spam filtering.

What's a little annoying about this at first is that e-mail advertising is typically sold by CPM. So let's say I have 20k subscribers on a list and I can sell for $20 CPM (not unrealistic at all in e-mail).. that's $400. But that's $400 whether my open rate is 20% or 60%.

The most eagle eyed advertisers will ask for historical click rates and open rates but you'd be surprised how many don't. So in a way I'd rather charge per click but this doesn't seem to be accepted practice in e-mail right now.

Last, I've not found the word "free" to be too much of a problem. It's pretty common in mails and doesn't appear to be much of a trigger unless you all-caps it or add exclamation marks (e.g. FREE!!)

What absolutely massacred one issue of a newsletter, though, was the "Do You Really Want to Be Making This Much Money When You're 50?" post that did the rounds on HN recently. I included it and that issue's open rate fell by over half! Why? It's about as spammy a title as you could get and set off a ton of bells. So now I do even more spam analysis with each issue I send ;-)

BTW, I'm always happy to answer questions about the e-mail newsletter game, so feel free. I could probably ramble here all day about it. It's fun!

nedwin• 14 years ago

Great post.

Where do I find great lists to send news to and advertise on (aside from LaunchBit)?

hippo334• 14 years ago

This is another property owned by LaunchBit, but perhaps this is what you're looking for: http://www.newsletterdirectory.co/directory/

It can help you find lists to get in touch with.

duck• 14 years ago

I've found the same thing about the word "free" and exclamation marks. Gmail especially seems to be tightening down in the last month or two - I've avoided the spam folder with Hacker Newsletter for the most part, but I'm seeing more and more valid newsletters ending up there lately.

ajtaylor3• 14 years ago

I've been subscribed to your HTML 5 and JS newsletters for a couple months now. The content has been great overall. Enough so that I'm asking you where I can signup for the other two newsletters. :)

petercooper8• 14 years ago

Great! :) http://rubyweekly.com/ is the Ruby one and http://statuscode.org/ is the one for programmers generally (covers algorithms, general advances in the field, generic tools, language agnostic articles, etc.)

sarah2079• 14 years ago

What's the best way to check your text to see if it will set off spam filters?

petercooper8• 14 years ago

MailChimp has two methods. They have something called Inbox Inspector (powered by Litmus) that can both show you visuals of your e-mail in various clients but also has about 10 different spam filters to test against. They also have something called "Delivery Doctor" which does a quicker check but is more a safety valve than anything super useful.

More generally, http://emailsuccess.com/ is a new service that you can send your e-mail to and it'll produce a report on all the problems, both technical and content-wise. I only just tried it for the first time and it gave a great report.

There's also http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ which is a JSON-accessible API to which you can send a mail and it'll run checks. Alternatively, you can just paste your message into the page.

benihana• 14 years ago

This kind of question is like asking a baseball shortstop a hypothetical: What do you do if the ball is hit to you.

Anyone who tries to answer it definitively is probably not going to give a good answer. You need to get context out of the situation before you can answer it well. Just like you wouldn't throw the ball to first base if you could try to turn a double play, you wouldn't expect similar open rates between a list made up of young tech savvy users and a list made up of senior citizens. You wouldn't expect similar open rates between a list that you have to opt-in to on a preferences page and a list that you are automatically signed up to when you register for a product.

petercooper8• 14 years ago

Very true. I've had people look at my ~50% open rates and think they were low.. but they were sending product updates to a dedicated list of people who wanted to learn about that product. And it's easy to look down on e-commerce folks getting 10-20% but.. they're sending mails every day and making 6 figures a mailing, etc.

It's so contextual it's ridiculous. Stats from companies like MailChimp try to break things down by 'industry' but it's still not all that useful to compare against. The type of mail is just as important (industry news, personal announcements, product promos, sales, etc.)

sudonim• 14 years ago

I'm on an email industry mailing list, and it seems big brands with giant lists are getting 1 - 5% opens and are really happy when they get a .5% increase on a newsletter.

kuida0r3• 14 years ago

Here's a chart of stats by industry that MailChimp published - http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benc... for reference. As petercooper said the industry isn't the best breakdown to compare against. It's probably more helpful to benchmark your own campaigns using A/B and optimize for your goal.

hippo334• 14 years ago

agreed. but, unfortunately, ppl always ask questions like this, and saying "it depends" isn't particularly satisfying. :( so, i thought i would put a stake in this conversation by offering our data.

bravoyankee2• 14 years ago

I've never gotten a 50% open rate (it's always been in the 10-15 range, and that's for people who voluntarily signed up) and I don't believe most people when they claim they get 50%+ consistently.

Funny thing is, most people do make that claim. They are the same people that say their penis is bigger than it actually is.

I think there's too many variables to say this is too small and that's too big (I'm talking about email open rates, stay with me here). Any information you get here probably isn't even worth considering.

Don't believe the hype.

petercooper8• 14 years ago

I don't believe most people when they claim they get 50%+ consistently.

I'm only one person, and not "most", and I don't want to share my latest data for commercial reasons but here's my open and click rates for all of my campaigns in September straight from the MailChimp's mouth: http://no.gd/openrates.jpg - these went out to a total of around 78k subscribers (software developers, specifically) each week.

Are most people lying though? I'm not so sure but the real proof of the pudding is in how much traffic they drive to you if you're in their newsletter somehow.

hippo334• 14 years ago

I can also vouch for that for Peter's list and all the other lists that are over the 50% mark in the graph on my blog post. Quite frankly, it IS HARD to get this high of an open rate. Peter and all the other publishers who are able to do it consistently are somewhat of an anomaly.

That said, another way I've seen this done is I know publishers who will actively unsubscribe people who are not opening. And, this will give you a much higher concentration of people who consistently open...

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

Here's a graph of open rates and click rates for a newsletter I send out 1-2 times a month:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/97lfk7clhj12flu/newsletter.png

According to Mailchimp, the list has an average open rate of 58% and an average click rate of 20%.

EDIT: hippo3 mentioned actively unsubscribing people who are not opening, in order to get a list with a high concentration of people who consistently open. As my newsletters contain no third party ads or promotions, I don't do such pruning.

I think there are a few reasons why our newsletters are well read:

- The content is very specific to our niche

- The target audience is members of our services

- Even though most readers are customers, they still have to opt-in to receive the newsletters

- I don't send newsletters out often, only 1-2 times a month

- The newsletters are sent out at pretty regular intervals, usually on Tuesday morning in the third week of the month

- The newsletters aren't very long, readers have to click through to read the entire articles

hippo334• 14 years ago

Great comment, Samuel_Michon. One thing that is interesting to me is that your newsletter requires ppl to click through to read the entire article (as does Peter's newsletters). This probably also helps with the accuracy of open rates. Even if a reader doesn't display images, Mailchimp (as well as other email service providers) will know if he/she opened the email via the click. So, it may be a more accurate count over an email that doesn't have any links in it... (just some speculation)

kat• 14 years ago

Why is 50% unbelievable?

I have sent out newsletters for a non-profit for the last two years and their open rate is 40-60%. I assume its harder to "sell" corporate newsletters but 50% doesn't sound outrageous to me.

eli• 14 years ago

In B2B emails, I've seen "good" defined as anywhere between 10% and 80%. It really, really depends.

One important thing to note is that "open rate" is a very fuzzy metric. It usually works by seeing if the recipient loaded images in the email... But aside from iPad and iPhone, pretty much all email clients do not load images by default. If your message is mostly text, many people won't bother loading images and the "open rate" you're seeing reported is going to be a dramatic undercount. Perversely, crummy messages sent to the same list that are unreadable without the images loaded will get a higher reported open rate even though fewer people may actually be reading them.

cypherpunks01• 14 years ago

How is "open rate" measured?

dripton• 14 years ago

Of course there's no foolproof way to tell if someone opened an email. You can do something like embed a link to an image with a unique URL for tracking, and hope people's email clients automatically follow such links. (Yours doesn't, mine doesn't, but your grandmother's might.)

polyfractal2• 14 years ago

Or hope you have engaging enough content that they click through one of your links. For example, email newsletters like HackerNewsletter are essentially just links, so there is a good chance a person will click through and be counted as an "open" (as well as a "click").

And the tracking pixel of course. Some clients auto-show images, some don't. Some people allow emails to show images, some people refuse. It's all just a "best guess".

n9com• 14 years ago

We get around a 50% open rate on our newsletters (40k+ double opt in subscribers).

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

I do not think open rate is a measurement worth tracking. The only way to measure an open is via image load, and this can fail in either direction. Almost every email client these days blocks images by default, so it can read low. But, many people use preview panes or open every email as a matter of process, even if they quickly discard it without reading--so it can read high. (edit to clarify--if they have opted to "always show images")

Clicks are a much more reliable metric of engagement because a click is always a click. Email clients can't hide them, and people rarely click through by accident.

If you engineer your email to be read all in one sitting (no clicking), then there is another option, which is to do what print publications do--pay someone to survey your readership and provide a statistical estimate of your active readership. This also gives you the opportunity to learn more about them, which might enhance your value proposition for advertisers--if you can show that the "right people" read your newsletter.

mistermcgruff• 14 years ago

I agree. Open rates are a bit wonky. If your list is more or less static in size and domain distribution then looking at open rate deltas can be informative.

Regarding click rate, here's some cool research I got to do recently: http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-good-marketers-can-learn-from...

patio11• 14 years ago

A few comparables:

My training list (need a better name for that) gets between 40 and 60% or so per mailing, long term average is 50%.

BCC typically gets about 40% on its "monthly" emails, although those are more like "semi-annually" these days -- didn't even send the Halloween one this year.

Clients' numbers are clients' numbers but, anecdotally, if you could wave a magic wand and get 40% from their lists they are interested in what you are selling and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

frisco• 14 years ago

FYI that's not a bell curve. It looks much more lognormal or Beta to me (or even Weibull or Gamma could fit it, if you didn't care about how meaningful the parameters were, or wanted to get creative in interpreting them).

If you go with Beta, Weibull, or Gamma distributions, mean and standard deviation are the wrong vocabulary to use. Obviously you can't tell just by looking at the plot, but it's an easy test to show definitively if it's normally distributed or not. The difference here is meaningful, depending on how much you want to read into the distribution of open rates.

dizzystar• 14 years ago

There is one missing item in this analysis: Outlook and other email clients that let you push the down arrow to see the next email and continue on.

I think open-rate is a terrible and meaningless metric unless there is a filter specifying @yahoo, @gmail, and other email clients that force you to explicitly open the emails. Even with this metric added in, there is still phone email clients and email settings where delete automatically sends the person to the next email.

Even after filtering the data open-rate is still pretty meaningless compared to conversion. Conversion is very easy number to measure, but extremely difficult to increase. I'd rather have a 10% open-rate with 25% conversion than 50% open-rate with 1% conversion. A high conversion-rate allows the company to discover their customers and their behavior. Increasing conversion is an art-form. Increasing open-rate is difficult as well, but it should be secondary to increasing conversion.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

It's all great, but how do they measure the open rate? From what I understand the only email client that leaks information (through css/img/font/etc back links) was Mail on iOS. Surely, you can't just extrapolate the open rate of Outlook users from that.

(edit) Or do they simply send a link to webpage and then count hits?

What is a good open rate for your email newsletter?

Related Stories