How To Analyze Email Open Rates
- Joseph Perry
- Sep 26
- 13 min read
Updated: Oct 21
Email open rates measure the percentage of recipients who open your email, helping you understand how well your campaigns connect with your audience. A good open rate typically falls between 15% and 25%, but this varies by industry and email type (e.g., transactional emails often perform better).
Key Takeaways:
Formula: (Unique Opens ÷ Delivered Emails) × 100. Exclude bounced emails to ensure accuracy.
Why It Matters: Open rates reveal the effectiveness of subject lines, audience engagement, and email deliverability.
Common Challenges:
Image Blocking: Some email clients block tracking pixels, underreporting opens.
Privacy Changes: Features like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can inflate open rates.
Tools to Track: Email platforms like Mailchimp and Klaviyo provide automated tracking and analytics, including heat maps and A/B testing.
Quick Tips to Improve Open Rates:
Write clear, engaging subject lines (personalization and curiosity work well).
Optimize email deliverability by maintaining clean lists and setting up SPF/DKIM/DMARC records.
Test and refine campaigns with A/B testing for subject lines, send times, and audience segments.
Pair open rates with other metrics like click-through rates and conversions for a full picture of your campaign’s performance. Consistently track trends and clean your email list to maintain strong engagement.
How Do You Analyze Email Open Rates? - TheEmailToolbox.com
How to Calculate Email Open Rates
Getting your email open rates right is crucial for understanding how well your campaigns are performing. The math itself is simple, but there are a few important details you need to keep in mind to ensure accuracy.
Open Rate Calculation Formula
To calculate email open rates, use this formula: (Number of Emails Opened ÷ Number of Delivered Emails) × 100
This percentage tells you how many recipients opened your email out of the ones who actually received it. But here's the key: exclude bounced emails from your calculation. Bounced emails - caused by invalid addresses, full inboxes, or server issues - never make it to the recipient's inbox. Including them in your denominator will skew your results, making your open rate appear lower than it actually is.
For example, imagine you send 10,000 emails, but 500 bounce back. Out of the remaining 9,500 delivered emails, 2,000 are opened. Using the formula: 2,000 ÷ (10,000 - 500) × 100 = 21.05%
If you mistakenly include the bounced emails, your open rate drops to 20%, giving you a less accurate view of your campaign's success.
Luckily, most email service providers handle this calculation for you. Still, knowing the formula can help you identify reporting errors and better understand your data. Once you've nailed down your open rate, it’s worth diving into other metrics to get a fuller picture of subscriber behavior.
Related Metrics to Track
Open rates are just one piece of the puzzle. To truly understand how your audience interacts with your emails, keep an eye on unique opens and total opens - two metrics that offer different insights.
Unique opens count how many individual subscribers opened your email, regardless of how many times each person opened it. As the Doppler Help Center explains:
Unique Opens: It indicates how many Subscribers opened your Email, no matter how many times they did it [1].
This metric highlights your campaign’s reach, showing how many distinct people engaged with your email.
Total opens, on the other hand, measure the total number of times your email was opened. If one subscriber opens your email multiple times, each instance is counted. Klaviyo's documentation puts it simply:
Total opens: The total number of times your message was opened. In other words, if one recipient opens your email twice, it counts as 2 total opens [2].
This metric gives you a sense of how engaging your content is - whether people are coming back to it multiple times.
Here’s an example from Doppler:
You send an Email Marketing Campaign to 10,000 Email Addresses. In Doppler's Report Section, you see 5,000 total opens, from which 4,000 have been unique. This means that 4,000 people opened your Campaign, but some of them opened it more than once, resulting in 5,000 total opens [1].
Another key number to track is delivered emails, which forms the foundation for all these calculations. This figure excludes hard bounces (permanent failures) and soft bounces (temporary issues), giving you a clear view of your actual audience for that campaign.
One last thing to keep in mind: privacy changes, like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, can inflate open rates by counting prefetches as opens. Instead of focusing on individual numbers, look at overall trends to get a better understanding of your campaign's performance.
Tools for Tracking Email Open Rates
Most email platforms handle open rate tracking automatically, making it easier to monitor how your email campaigns are performing. Understanding how these tools work - and their limitations - can help you make smarter decisions for your marketing efforts.
Email Service Provider Analytics
Your email service provider (ESP) is the go-to source for open rate data. Platforms like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, and AWeber track email opens and display the results in user-friendly dashboards. These dashboards not only show your overall open rate but also provide details such as:
When emails were opened
Devices used to access them
Comparisons to past campaigns
Many ESPs also include advanced features like heat maps to identify the best times to send emails, A/B testing results for subject line performance, and segmentation tools to analyze open rates by specific subscriber groups. On top of that, they often provide industry benchmarks so you can see how your open rate measures up against others in your field.
The best part? ESP analytics are fully automated. Once you hit send, the data starts rolling in without any extra steps on your part. This lets you focus on interpreting the results rather than worrying about setup. But to make the most of this data, it’s important to understand how these metrics are collected and the potential limitations.
Tracking Methods and Limitations
Email open tracking relies on tracking pixels - tiny, invisible images embedded in your email. When a recipient opens your email and their email client downloads images, the pixel logs the open. While this method is widely used, it’s not without flaws.
One major issue is image blocking. Many email clients, particularly in corporate settings, block images by default. If someone reads your email but doesn’t download the images, their open won’t be recorded. This means your actual open rate could be higher than what’s reported.
On the flip side, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can inflate open rates. Apple pre-downloads images, so even if a recipient doesn’t actually open your email, it might still register as an open. Given that Apple Mail is widely used - especially on mobile devices - this can significantly affect your metrics.
Another challenge is multiple opens from the same person. Some email clients refresh or re-download images automatically, which can create duplicate open events. While most ESPs filter out obvious duplicates, some inaccuracies may still slip through.
Despite these challenges, tracking open rates is still a valuable way to spot trends and compare the success of different campaigns. For a deeper dive into your email performance, you can also turn to additional tools.
Additional Analysis Tools
While ESP analytics provide a solid foundation, other tools can give you a more detailed view of your email campaigns. For example:
Google Analytics: By adding UTM parameters to your email links, you can track how much traffic your emails drive to your website and see who clicked through.
CRM Systems: Platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce connect email activity to sales outcomes. This lets you see whether email opens lead to meetings, demos, or purchases.
API Integrations: For advanced users, APIs can link your email data with other business metrics. By combining open rate data with sales figures, website analytics, or customer lifetime value, you can get a more complete picture of your campaign’s overall impact.
These tools, when used alongside your ESP, can help you refine your strategy and better understand how your emails contribute to broader business goals.
How to Improve Email Open Rates
Boosting email open rates starts with understanding your data and turning insights into actionable strategies. By focusing on what drives subscriber behavior, you can craft emails that not only land in inboxes but also get opened.
Writing Better Subject Lines
Think of your subject line as the headline of your email - it’s the first thing people see, so it needs to grab attention and spark curiosity. Personalization is a great way to make your email feel relevant. Include details like the recipient's name, location, or even recent purchases. You can also reference things like their company, industry, or local events to create a stronger connection.
Creating a sense of urgency or scarcity can also encourage immediate action. Phrases such as "24 hours left" or "Only a few spots remaining" can push recipients to open your email sooner rather than later. That said, don’t overdo it - if every email feels like a high-pressure sales pitch, it’ll lose its impact.
Using questions or curiosity gaps is another effective tactic. Subject lines like "Did you miss this yesterday?" or "The one mistake marketers keep making" create a sense of intrigue. Just make sure your email content delivers on the promise of the subject line - nothing kills trust faster than clickbait.
Keep subject lines short and mobile-friendly. Many people check their emails on their phones, so aim for 30-50 characters to avoid getting cut off. Place the most important words at the beginning to ensure they’re seen.
Finally, avoid spam trigger words like "free", "guaranteed", or "act now", and don’t overuse exclamation points. These can send your emails straight to the spam folder, no matter how compelling your subject line is.
Once you’ve nailed your subject lines, it’s important to make sure your emails actually reach the inbox.
Improving Email Deliverability
Even the best subject line won’t matter if your emails don’t make it to the inbox. Email deliverability - the ability to land your emails in subscribers’ inboxes instead of their spam folders - is key to improving open rates.
Your sender reputation plays a big role here. Email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook monitor how recipients interact with your emails. If too many people mark your emails as spam, delete them without reading, or simply never engage, your reputation takes a hit. A poor reputation means fewer emails get delivered.
To prove you’re a legitimate sender, set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain. These authentication tools show email providers that your emails are trustworthy. Most email platforms provide instructions on how to configure these settings.
Maintaining a clean email list is just as important. Regularly remove inactive subscribers - those who haven’t engaged in months - and delete addresses that consistently bounce. High bounce rates signal to email providers that you might be sending to outdated or invalid lists, which can hurt your deliverability.
Consistency is another factor. Stick to regular sending patterns. Sudden spikes in frequency, like jumping from weekly to daily emails, or long gaps followed by a flood of emails, can trigger spam filters.
Keep an eye on your metrics. A sudden drop in open rates could point to a deliverability issue. Monitor spam complaints, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates to catch and fix problems early.
Once you’ve ensured your emails are landing in inboxes, it’s time to fine-tune your campaigns for even better results.
Testing and Optimizing Campaigns
A/B testing is a powerful way to refine your email strategy. Test different elements like subject lines, send times, sender names, preview text, and audience segments. Start by sending two versions to small groups - around 10-20% of your list - then send the winning version to the rest of your subscribers.
For subject lines, you can test approaches like questions versus statements or personalized versus generic versions. When it comes to send time, try different times of day and days of the week. Business audiences often respond better on weekdays, especially Tuesday through Thursday, while weekends might work better for consumer-focused brands.
Experiment with from names too. Emails sent from a person’s name, like "Sarah from [Company]", often perform better than those from just a company name. People are more likely to open emails from names they recognize and trust.
Your preview text is another opportunity to hook readers. Instead of repeating your subject line, use it to add context or tease what’s inside without giving too much away.
Finally, segmentation testing can help you understand how different groups respond. Test campaigns on new subscribers versus long-term ones, or compare customers to prospects. Tailoring your emails to specific segments often leads to better engagement.
For businesses looking for expert help, Big Drift Marketing applies these proven strategies to consistently improve email open rates and overall campaign success.
How to Analyze Open Rates with Other Metrics
Open rates are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding your email campaign’s performance. To get a clearer picture, you need to pair them with other key metrics. This section dives into how combining open rates with additional data points can give you deeper insights into your email marketing efforts.
Using Open Rates with Other Metrics
Open rates are a starting point, but they don’t tell the whole story. Here are some other metrics to consider for a more complete analysis:
Click-through rates (CTR): If your emails have a high open rate but a low CTR, it might mean your subject line grabs attention, but the email content doesn’t inspire further action. This is a sign to revisit your email design or call-to-action (CTA).
Conversion rates: Even with strong open and click-through rates, low conversions could signal a disconnect between your email content and the desired action. Integrating your email platform with tools like website analytics or e-commerce tracking can help pinpoint where the drop-off happens.
Unsubscribe rates: A spike in unsubscribes after a campaign - even one with good open rates - can indicate that your content isn’t meeting expectations. It might feel too promotional or lack the value your audience is looking for.
Bounce rates: High bounce rates not only hurt your sender reputation but also suggest issues with your email list. Regularly cleaning your list and removing invalid addresses can help maintain healthy metrics.
List growth rate: If your subscriber list is growing, but open rates are declining, it could be a sign that your onboarding process isn’t setting the right expectations or that new subscribers aren’t your ideal audience.
Revenue per email: For e-commerce businesses, this metric is crucial. By dividing the total revenue from a campaign by the number of emails sent, you can measure the financial impact of your efforts and identify what’s working.
Reporting and Benchmarking
Clear and consistent reporting is essential for tracking your email performance over time. Use standard U.S. formatting - like MM/DD/YYYY for dates, commas for large numbers, and percentages with one decimal place - to make your reports easy to read.
Instead of focusing on individual campaigns, create monthly reports to identify trends. Compare current data with past performance, and consider external factors, such as seasonal shifts or changes in strategy, that might influence your results.
While industry benchmarks can provide context, your own historical data is often more revealing. A noticeable change in your open rate - whether above or below industry averages - deserves closer examination to understand what’s driving the shift.
Segmenting your reports by audience, campaign type, or time frame can uncover valuable insights. For example, you might find that emails sent on certain days or at specific times perform better, which can help you refine your strategy.
Keeping a record of what works - and what doesn’t - can help you plan future campaigns more effectively. Track elements like subject lines, content formats, and audience segments to build a data-driven approach for ongoing improvement.
When to Get Professional Help
As your email marketing grows, analyzing all these metrics can become overwhelming. If you’re struggling to make sense of the data or turn insights into action, it might be time to bring in an expert.
Big Drift Marketing specializes in helping businesses improve their email performance. They can set up tracking systems, design testing strategies, and provide guidance on areas like deliverability, segmentation, and automation. With their support, you can avoid common mistakes - like over-emailing engaged subscribers or ignoring inactive ones - and focus on improving engagement, maintaining a healthy email list, and driving more revenue from your campaigns.
Key Takeaways for Email Open Rate Analysis
To get a full picture of your email performance, it's essential to look beyond open rates and include metrics like click-through rates (CTR) and conversions. While the average open rate generally falls between 20–25%, this range can vary widely depending on the industry. For example, sectors such as education, agriculture, and financial services often see averages closer to 25–28% [3][5]. These benchmarks provide a useful starting point for evaluating trends, list quality, and external factors.
Time-based trends also reveal valuable insights. According to Salesforce, open rates increased from 33.07% in 2023 to 36.24% in 2024, with seasonal dips beginning in March and peaks during November and December [4]. Tracking these patterns can help you anticipate fluctuations and adjust your strategy accordingly.
However, focusing on your own historical data is even more important than relying on industry averages. For instance, while the industry average in 2021 was 21.5%, your unique trends tell a more meaningful story [5]. A sudden drop in open rates might point to issues like email deliverability or subscriber fatigue. On the other hand, unexpected spikes could indicate successful content or a wave of new subscribers [4].
List hygiene and personalization are non-negotiable. Open rates below 10% often signal problems like outdated contact lists or irrelevant messaging [3]. Regularly cleaning your list and segmenting your audience can significantly boost engagement.
External factors also play a role in shaping open rates. For example, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, email provider algorithm updates, and even AI-generated email summaries have all impacted open rate metrics [4]. Because of these variables, it’s better to focus on long-term trends rather than fixating on the performance of individual campaigns.
If analyzing all this data feels like too much to handle, you’re not alone. Seeking professional help can simplify the process. Companies like Big Drift Marketing specialize in fine-tuning email campaigns, addressing delivery issues, improving segmentation, and turning email performance insights into revenue.
FAQs
How can I measure email open rates effectively despite privacy challenges?
Measuring email open rates has become trickier with privacy updates and image blocking making their mark. To get a better sense of how your email campaigns are performing, it’s smart to shift your attention to other key metrics like click-through rates, conversions, and overall engagement. These numbers often paint a much clearer picture of how your audience is responding to your emails.
You can also dig deeper by using engagement-based segmentation and keeping tabs on multiple touchpoints - think website visits or specific actions your recipients take. While open rates can still give you some insight, leaning on a mix of metrics will give you a more accurate read on your email marketing efforts, especially in today’s privacy-first world.
How can I increase email open rates and improve deliverability?
To increase email open rates and ensure better deliverability, start by maintaining a clean and active email list. Remove inactive subscribers regularly and verify email addresses to reduce bounce rates. It's also essential to authenticate your emails using protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to establish a strong sender reputation and stay out of spam folders.
Write subject lines that grab attention and feel personal to your audience. Test different sending times to see what resonates best with your recipients. Most importantly, focus on sharing relevant and interesting content that keeps your audience engaged and eager to open your emails. These steps can help your email campaigns thrive while keeping your audience connected and interested.
How can I use email open rates along with other metrics like click-through rates and conversions to measure my campaign's performance?
Email open rates are a good starting point to measure how many recipients were curious enough to open your email. But to truly understand your campaign's success, you need to look beyond just opens. Pair open rates with click-through rates (CTR) to see how many people are actually engaging with your content, and track conversions to measure actions like purchases, sign-ups, or downloads.
By combining these metrics, you get a clearer picture - not just of who opened your email, but also of how they interacted with it and whether they followed through on your call-to-action. This kind of analysis helps pinpoint what’s working and what needs tweaking, so you can make smarter, data-driven changes to improve your campaign’s performance.
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