What is a good open rate for email: A detailed guide for 2025

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Knowing what a good open rate for an email is can help you optimize your marketing strategy. Although you may think that email communication is outdated in the era of social media, the truth is it’s still an effective way to reach existing and potential customers. Convincing enough people to open and read your emails can get them to engage with your brand, which can positively affect your sales numbers. 

This article can help you better understand what an email open rate is, teach you how to calculate it, outline what a good open rate for an email is based on relevant factors, and explain how Omnisend can help you improve it.

What is email open rate?

An email open rate is a key email marketing metric that indicates the percentage of recipients who open an email out of the total number sent.

For example, an email open rate of 35% means 35 out of 100 subscribers opened your email. 

Although email open rates alone don’t measure email marketing success, understanding this metric is crucial for business owners and marketers for the following reasons:

• Open rates indicate which email format performs best with your subscribers
• A low email open rate can hurt email sender’s reputation and eventually affect deliverability
• Open rates are precursors for other critical email marketing metrics like click-through and conversion rates
• Tracking and measuring open rates is integral to A/B testing

What is a good open rate for email?

The percentage of recipients who need to open your emails for a good email open rate is probably lower than you think. While it depends on the industry you’re operating in, a good open rate is somewhere between 15 and 25%. The average is 21.33%, so you can take any number higher than that as a sign that your email marketing campaign is working well.

How to calculate email open rate?

To calculate the email marketing open rate, simply divide the number of people who opened your email by the total number to which it was sent to. Here’s the formula:

Email open rate = (Number of subscribers who opened the email / Total number of recipients) x 100

There are two types of open rates: unique and total. 

The unique open rate indicates the percentage of unique recipients who have opened your email once it landed in their inbox.

On the other hand, the total open rate is the sum of all instances where a recipient opened your email — including multiple opens by the same subscriber. 

While open rate sets the ground for email marketing campaign success, it’s not the only metric you must measure. Response, bounce, conversion, unsubscribe, and click-through rates are other email marketing metrics used in measuring campaign success. 

Industry benchmarks for email open rates

Omnisend’s 2024 Email, SMS, and push marketing statistics indicate that the average open rate for Omnisend merchants has increased from 22.9% in 2022 to 25.1% in 2023. 

The answer as to what a good email open rate is can vary from one industry to another, though. For example, beauty and cosmetics companies had an average email open rate of 23.8%, while books and literature businesses had an average of almost 10 percentage points higher, at 33.1%. Companies promoting holiday and seasonal products and services had the highest email open rate, at 35.9%.

Below are a few factors influencing open rate benchmarks:

• Type of industry: Average open rates can differ greatly between industries. Apparel, B2B/B2C, Cosmetics, Travel, Books, Food, etc., may have varying user engagement levels. This means the open rate between them isn’t worth comparing.
• Target audience: Different audience groups may have different email checking preferences. Also, the level of email personalization based on user preferences can influence the open rate.
• Email type: Promotional, announcements, educational, welcome, transactional, and feedback are common email types with varying open rates. For example, automated transactional emails (order/shipping confirmations) have a higher open rate than promotional emails: 

Factors affecting email open rates

When trying to boost your email open rate figures, it’s also important to know what you shouldn’t do. This video explores seven common mistakes that you should avoid if you want more people to open your emails:

Let’s take a close look at factors affecting email open rates:

1. Subject lines 

The email subject line is the first thing that pops up on your recipient’s screens. So clickbaity, irrelevant, vague, or weak subject lines have lower chances of getting opened.

Remember that subject line lengths can affect email visibility. Say your recipients are mobile users — the subject line will be cut off earlier than it would on a desktop computer. As a result, potentially crucial information like discounts or sale alerts may get hidden — negatively affecting open rates. 

A few other subject line aspects you must consider while crafting emails are:

• Use of personalization: Personalizing your email subject lines with the recipient’s first name, including a personalized offer, or similar elements that are contextual to their journey with your brand, can lead to higher open rates and engagement. For example, combine FOMO with first names: “Hey (first_name), 30% off your next purchase before midnight.”
• Tone and clarity: Your subject line can influence whether your email lands in the spam folder. Have a friendly and casual tone, and be clear with fewer but relevant words, e.g., “Last 5 hours…”
• A/B test subject lines: Not all subject lines lead to great open rates, no matter how meticulously you plan them. So, to avoid wasted efforts, perform A/B testing on a small batch of email subject lines to analyze how your recipients respond and engage with them.

2. Sender reputation 

Sending an email doesn’t guarantee that it’ll reach your recipients. To combat spam, Internet service providers (ISPs) monitor multiple factors, including the engagement on your emails, to give you a sender reputation score.

It’s especially important for new accounts to spend time on email domain warmup, which is the practice of improving your email account’s reputation to avoid being flagged as “suspicious” by ISPs.

ISPs assign a sender reputation score to every brand sending emails. So, the higher the score, the greater the likelihood of them delivering your emails to the desired recipients. To maintain a high score, perform regular list cleaning by deleting inactive, fraudulent subscribers and tracking user engagement. 

Likewise, a high spam rate can lower your sender reputation score. You can tackle this by only sending relevant emails and keeping your list clean.

3. Email list quality 

Your email list quality correlates to your potential email open rate. 

How?

Sending emails to inactive or uninterested subscribers is like shooting arrows into the dark. Your chances of engaging them are slim. 

Here’s how to maintain email list quality for the best open rate:

• Subscriber segmentation: Segmenting lists can help you deliver relevant messages to the right user group. For example, dividing subscribers based on their website interactions (adding products to the cart, browsing a specific section, etc.) lets you tailor offers and increase the chance of conversion.
• List hygiene: Subscribers are ever-evolving. So, if you’re reusing your email list created at the beginning of your marketing strategy, it’s time to rethink your process. Regularly delete inactive, unengaged subscribers to ensure higher open rates and email marketing ROI.
• Acquiring subscribers: Start from square one. Change your subscriber acquisition methods to collect high-intent contacts. For example, use double opt-ins to reconfirm subscriptions. 

4. Timing and frequency 

Sending emails by understanding the optimal time when your subscribers are most active can improve email open rates. 

What are the best times to send an email for higher open rates? 

• Tuesdays have the highest open rates, while Fridays are for higher conversions
• The beginning of the month has shown the highest open and conversion rates
• The best times to email are 8 PM, 2 PM, and 5 PM

However, days and times can vary by industry or audience. For example, B2B audiences are most active during business hours before 6 PM, and ecommerce customers are most active during weekends or after business hours. You can use these as a starting point, but then you need to experiment to see what your audience responds to.

And coming to email frequency, maintaining a balance is crucial to gaining higher open rates. 

Too many or too frequent emails can frustrate your recipients, and inconsistency can cause a drop in engagement rates. Most marketers consider between one and three weekly emails to be the golden standard for maintaining good open rates.

5. Mobile optimization 

Mobile devices and desktops have different ways of rendering emails. For starters, mobiles have smaller screens and support vertical scrolling, while desktops have all kinds of scrolling with a wider canvas. 

Medium-length subject lines that work well on desktop browsers may get cut off on mobile devices, hampering open rates. 

So here’s what you can do for better mobile optimization:

• Create responsive email design: Ensure your email design adapts well to different screen sizes by optimizing images and cutting down lengthy content. Also, using suitable font sizes improves readability, making your email more accessible.
• Use preheader texts: A preheader offers a quick overview of the email’s body and is placed next to the subject line in an inbox. For mobiles, 30 to 55 characters are optimal. Make the most of it by adding catchy, relevant, and clear text.
• Use a clear CTA: Testing your call to actions (CTAs) is critical to your email’s success. Run A/B tests to find the best-performing copy, placement, and designs for mobile devices separately. 

6. Technical factors 

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are called the golden trio for IP reputation and authentication. Not staying compliant with any of these protocols would significantly impact your open rates, no matter how good your email content is. 

As you grow, learn the technicalities behind triggered spam filters. 

How Omnisend can help improve your email open rate

Omnisend is a complete email marketing solution tailored for ecommerce businesses. It offers multiple tools that can help you improve your email open rates, such as email list cleaning, automation, email warm-up, and audience segmentation. 

Here’s a breakdown of Omnisend’s advanced tools that improve and maintain email open rates:

• Easy-to-use drag-and-drop Email Builder: Well-designed emails can improve open rates. Omnisend’s Email Builder makes email campaign creation seamless using optimized templates and auto-branding your emails based on your website. 
• Targeted campaigns: Build and run personalized email campaigns on auto-pilot to ensure timely and relevant communication reaches the right people at the perfect time. For example, you could send cart abandonment emails within 90 minutes of the user’s abandonment session. 
• Precise segmentation: Omnisend analyzes your customers’ profile data to set up dynamic segments based on their engagement levels, purchase history, transactional events, and so on. Doing so is key to delivering emails that each user group can resonate with and want to open and click through. 
• Split test emails: What’s the best email combination to fetch the highest open rate? A/B testing is the only way to know. Omnisend lets you split-test multiple email marketing campaigns to find the best-performing one. For example, testing various subject lines, CTAs, content lengths, timings, and frequency.
• Powerful analytics: Omnisend’s analytical tools help you keep track of email open rates and other key email deliverability metrics. Access detailed campaign performance reports for a bird’s-eye-view of email metrics and use them to make smarter improvements to upcoming email marketing efforts.

The story of how 123Presets doubled its revenue by working on its deliverability with the help of Omnisend is a great example of how important your email open rate is. After implementing Omnisend’s recommendations, its open rates increased by 62.3%, leading to a surge in sales.

The bigger picture: Beyond email open rates

As mentioned, email open rates do not paint a complete picture of campaign success. High open rates don’t always mean greater returns. 

Although open rate sets the stage for tracking content relevance, there are other critical email marketing metrics every ecommerce business must track, including engagement metrics like conversion, click-through, unsubscribe, and cart abandonment rates. Transactional metrics also include the average order value, revenue generated per email, and the overall email campaign ROI. 

Does this mean you can overlook email open rates? The short answer is no!

Opening an email is the very first subscriber action, followed by email click-through and conversion. So, it’s safe to say the open rate is the primary building block of measuring and optimizing email marketing success. 

Conclusion 

A good email open rate alone may not always indicate the true success of your email marketing efforts. However, viewing open rate as a basic component of a larger email marketing strategy is important. 

Understand what factors influence email open rates so you can start working on improving other critical email marketing metrics. 

And remember, email marketing is a non-stop journey. Just like subscribers, your email campaigns must evolve to suit their best interests.

FAQs

1. Is a 50% open rate good for email?

Yes. A 50% email open rate is considered a good email open rate and is far beyond the average of 21%.

2. What’s a good email open rate 2025?

An email open rate for most industries can be anywhere between 15 to 25%. The average is 21.33%. If your email open rate crosses this average, it’s a sign that your emails are performing well.

3. How can I improve my email subject lines?

Email subject lines can make or break your email open rates. To improve your email subject lines, try cutting the length, personalizing it, eliminating spammy words, creating urgency, and testing multiple subject lines to pick the best-performing one. Try Omnisend’s free subject line tester to see how you can make improvements.

4. What is a good open rate for a newsletter?

A good email open rate for newsletters is anything over 22.86%.