Email marketing can be an exciting (and confusing!) journey. When sending out an email to your list, do you sometimes get a bit discouraged at the open rate?

What is a good click-through rate?

What’s even normal?

20%? 30%? 50%?

There’s no doubt that email marketing should be a vital part of your overall strategy since email marketing has proven to be 40% more effective for obtaining new customers than Facebook or Twitter (source). But what is an average percentage of how many people should be opening your campaigns?

Email marketing has proven to be 40% more effective for obtaining new customers than Facebook or Twitter

It’s a question I get asked all the time, which is why I wanted to address this today. Knowing standard open and click-through rates help to give you a benchmark for your email marketing efforts, so you can know if you need to up your game.

I’ve compiled data from a few different sources to help you know what your email open and click-through rates should be.

First, let me explain quickly what an open rate is.

An open rate is a measurement of how many people opened your email. You’ll normally see it as a percentage, based off of the following formula:

So, a 25% open rate would mean that out of every 100 emails sent out, 25 were actually opened.

Easy enough, right?

SO WHAT’S A STANDARD OPEN RATE?

According to Hubspot, companies with 1-10 employees will see an average open rate of 35% and a click-through rate of 6.9%.

Mailchimp gives lower expectations, stating that companies with 1-10 employees will see an average of 22% open rate with closer to a 3% click-through rate.

Here at The Virtual Savvy, we generally have about a 30% open rate with a 6% click-through rate.

The final verdict?

If you are getting an open rate above 20% with a 3%-5% click-through rate, you are staying competitive in the email marketing game.

SOME VARIATIONS

There are a few reasons why your open and click-through rates may differ from the stats above. Here are a few to consider:

• As your list size increases, your open and click-through rates may decrease. You want to make sure that you are building a quality email list, not just trying to reach a certain number of subscribers. If someone hasn’t opened an email of yours in over 6 months, it may be time to weed them out.
• Companies that focus on one specific niche will normally have higher click-through rates than those who have very broad topics.
• Most of your open rates will happen within 6 hours of sending out your email, which is why the time of day is important when sending out your campaign.