For brands interested in email marketing, the reality of the results can be intimidating. If your brand is getting 20% open rates, you’re doing pretty well for yourself. And depending on your industry overall, you may not even get 20%; there are plenty of blog posts out there to give you an idea of what your industry generally achieves.

(Disclaimer: You’re never going to achieve 100% open rate; even when the send is more targeted, you’re still going to be fortunate to get 30% of the emails you send opened by the recipient. If that seems crazy to you, consider your own email opening habits: do you open 100% of the mail that gets to your inbox? What about 30%? I know I don’t. It’s probably far less than that, if I’m being honest.)

That’s not to say open rate is NOT important, however. I mean, if you can’t get the recipient to even open your message, they aren’t going to click on anything.

The question is though: what can we do to try to improve those open rates?

Before You Start

Before you do anything else, ask yourself: what’s your open rate right now? Not the open rate of the last email you sent, but what your overall open rate is. Don’t know? Take some time to figure it out. If you can, figure it out for all of your email sends for the past year and get yourself an overall number. Any email sending platform worth its salt should be able to tell you on an email-by-email basis. (Maybe you should make a spreadsheet so you can keep track.)