
What is a good open rate for your email newsletter? - hippo33
http://www.launchbit.com/blog/what-is-a-good-open-rate-for-your-email-newsletter/
======
petercooper
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!

~~~
ajtaylor
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. :)

~~~
petercooper
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.)

~~~
ajtaylor
Signed up! I don't use Ruby much, but I'm curious to see what I can steal from
Ruby back to Perl. :)

BTW, you should include links to the other 3 lists on all the websites. I see
that statuscode.org and rubyweekly.com have it now, but when I checked the JS
site earlier I couldn't find a link.

~~~
petercooper
Technically they're at <https://cooperpress.com/> but the whole idea of them
collecting together as related newsletters hasn't quite gelled yet. It will
take a little bit of work to do it right.

BTW, there's a Perl Weekly as well which was inspired by the Ruby one. I don't
run it but it's at <http://perlweekly.com/> and follows a similar formula to
mine.

~~~
ajtaylor
This is a massively late reply, but I've been signed up for the perl weekly
newsletter from its inception. Thank you for mentioning it though! I'm sure
Gabor is grateful for the link. :)

------
patio11
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.

------
snowwrestler
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
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...](http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-good-marketers-can-learn-from-v1agr-
spammers/)

------
dizzystar
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.

------
frisco
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.

------
eli
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.

------
huhtenberg
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?

------
cypherpunks01
How is "open rate" measured?

~~~
dripton
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.)

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

------
benihana
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.

~~~
petercooper
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.)

~~~
kuida0r3
Here's a chart of stats by industry that MailChimp published -
[http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-
benc...](http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks-
by-industry/) 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.

~~~
ams6110
To me, one big driver of whether I will open unsolicited mail is how often
that sender sends something out. If I am getting email from you 3 or 4 times a
week, it's almost guaranteed to be going straight into the trash. Not only am
I not opening it, I'm not really even reading the subject line.

Once a week is borderline. Once a month is probably about right. Don't abuse
your subscriber's time.

------
bravoyankee
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.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
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

~~~
hippo33
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)

