About 20-30% is a normal open rate, but a lot depends on your list, your content type, and how frequently you send your campaigns (and how fatigued your recipients are). Your very first campaign may see a high open rate (like +40%) but things quickly level off with subsequent campaigns. Here are some tips if you’re seeing below average open performance:
Ineffective subject line
Your subject line is one of the most important elements of your email campaign. It’s got to be relevant and compelling to each and every one of your recipients. You should be spending a significant amount of time writing your subject line. Practice by splitting your list in half, then testing different subject lines on each group, to see which gets opened more. Your recipients get hundreds of emails a day. Why should they open yours?
Bad Timing
Experiment by sending your campaign on different days (and times). If you’re trying to promote a weekend event, you might get better results with a Thursday campaign than a Monday campaign. If you’re sending to corporate recipients, you might avoid the morning email flood, and send just after people have deleted their usual early-morning spam.
Blocked Images
It could be that your recipients are opening your emails just fine, but their email applications are simply blocking images to protect their privacy (this would block the tracker images, thereby lowering your open rates). Check your click rates too---if you’re getting tons of clicks, but low opens, you’ll know they’re just not displaying your images. Some email applications will turn images on by default, if the sender is in the address book (AOL does this). You might place a tiny line of text near the top of your email, asking people to "add our email address to your address book." You should also place this instructional message on your opt-in confirmation screen, and all welcome emails that you send.
List Fatigue
Perhaps you’re sending your campaigns too frequently, and people are just tired of hearing from you. You could send a little less often, or offer different types of communications (daily vs. weekly vs. monthly) that they can sign up for.
Poor List Quality
If you’re using a very old list of customers, a lot of the addresses on your list have probably gone bad. People change their email addresses all the time, such as when they start receiving too much spam, or when they switch ISPs, or when they sign up for services that offer free addresses. We’ve seen some customers collecting opt-in lists on their website, but they wait too long before sending their emails.
Poor Content
People get tons of email. Why should they read yours? If you’re not providing compelling, useful content in your emails, they’re not going to open it. People don’t want to just hear from you. They want something useful from you.
