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How To Increase Open Rates on Emails & Boost Engagement
Here’s How To Optimize Your Email Engagement
Brandon Storey
October 24th, 2024
It doesn’t matter how big your email list is.
Want to know what really matters? The number of engaged subscribers on your list.
You might have a list size of 10,000.
But if you only get 10% open rates, only 1,000 people are actually reading your newsletters on a regular basis. That means the other 9,000 are irrelevant to your newsletter and your business.
If you want to get the most out of your email list, you need to focus on increasing your email open rates.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to increase your open rates and make your newsletter a success.
Let’s begin.
Why Listen to Me? I’ve generated over $1 million with email and written over 1,000 blog posts. I run Storey Time, a newsletter where I teach people how to become full-time digital writers. Feel free to reach out to me on X anytime!
Table of Contents
Understanding Email Open Rates
Want to get your money’s worth from your email newsletter? You need to understand email open rates.
First, let’s calculate the open rate.
Calculating Email Open Rate
The email open rate is simply the total number of emails divided by the total number of delivered emails, multiplied by 100. This means that if you sent an email newsletter to 10,000 people and 1,389 opened it, you’d have an open rate of 13.89%.
13.89% = 1,389 / 10,000 x 100
The open rate is important since it shows you exactly how many people actually read your newsletter.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many people are on your list if they’re not reading your content.
Your open rate is a telltale sign of the health of your newsletter and how successful you’re managing your list and creating helpful content.
The question is: What’s a good open rate?
Average Email Open Rates
Now that you understand how to calculate your open rate, what do you do next?
Well, simply knowing your open rate isn’t enough. You need to have a benchmark to compare it to.
Thankfully, at beehiiv, we have that data for you.
Our “2024 State of the Newsletters Report” found that the average open rate was 38.7% across all beehiiv newsletters. This means that if you have a list size of 10,000 people, you should expect about 3,870 opens every time you send your newsletter.
My newsletter, Storey Time, has 1,829 subscribers, and my open rate is 47.2%; so my open rate is 22% higher than the average rate.
I think there’s still room for improvement, though, especially since I’m due for some list cleaning (which we’ll cover in a bit).
Now, it’s your turn.
Calculate your open rate now. How does it stack up against the average? If it’s higher, you’re probably on the right track. If it’s lower, you’ve probably got some work to do.
Open Rates by Industry
The reality is that every industry is different.
Some industries and topics boast higher overall open rates, while others are lower.
If you want to take it to the next level, you should compare the open rate of your newsletter to other newsletters in the same industry.
In our “State of the Newsletters Report,” our first-party data of beehiiv users revealed open rates broken down by industry.
For example, art newsletters had an average open rate of 27.9%, while venture capital was almost twice as high at 50.4%. This is why it’s crucial to compare your open rate to newsletters in your industry.
Take a look now to see how you stack up:
In my newsletter, Storey Time, I teach people how to make money online with copywriting and ghostwriting, so my newsletter is in the “Writing” industry.
The average email open rate for newsletters within the writing industry is 42.6%. So while my open rate of 47.2% is 22% higher than the general average, it’s only slightly higher than my industry average (11% higher).
Looking at this data reminds me even more that it’s important that I spend some more time optimizing my open rates.
It’s your turn again.
What industry category does your newsletter fall under?
Calculate your open rate again. How does it stack up against the averages in your industry?
4 Key Factors That Influence Open Rates
Nowadays, email is one of the most dominant digital communication channels.
In 2023, business owners and newsletter operators sent nearly 347 billion emails every day, on average.
347 billion. Every. Single. Day. That’s more than four emails sent per day for every person on Earth, and email isn't shrinking back by any means. It’s only growing. By 2026, this number is expected to climb to 392 billion daily emails, which is almost 5 emails per person.
The problem?
More and more emails are being sent every year, which means that email inboxes are being saturated more each year. You need to work harder to get your email to stand out in the inbox, so your subscriber actually opens it.
Thankfully, by understanding a few fundamentals of open rates, you can get your readers to click on your emails when you send them over.
Here are some key factors that impact your email open rates:
1. Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation is the most important aspect of your email open rates.
If you have a bad digital reputation, it doesn’t matter how good your newsletters are or how genuinely you want to help your subscribers.
A bad sender reputation will ruin your open rates.
What exactly is a sender reputation?
Your sender reputation is a score determined by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. They assign a score internally to a brand or business. You can think of it like a credit score.
If you have a high score, your emails are more likely to make it into your readers’ inboxes. If your score is low, ISPs will start filtering your emails and placing them in either spam or promotions folders when you send them to your subscribers.
Just remember, the higher the score, the higher the probability of your email deliverability.
Improve your sender reputation, and you’ll improve your deliverability. In turn, you’ll raise your open rates.
To learn more, check out our guide on Protecting Your Sender Reputation.
2. Quality Content
The next most important factor after sender reputation is your content.
If your content is bad, you’re going to start to lose readers. It’s as simple as that.
You may be able to convince someone to sign up for your email list, but keeping them there is a whole new challenge in itself.
Churn affects every email newsletter operator and business owner, but reducing the number of people who unsubscribe (or simply stop opening your emails) is crucial to seeing success with your newsletter.
The best way to get people to open your emails is to focus on creating only high-quality content. What does this actually mean, though? It means creating newsletter content that resonates with your audience – crafting relevant content, understanding your audience’s pain points, desires, and dreams, and solving them with your newsletters.
For example, you can create a beehiiv poll directly within your newsletter to ask your audience what kind of content they want to read.
Rather than guessing what kind of content your audience wants, just ask them. They’ll be more than happy to share, and it’s never been easier to collect poll data for your newsletter than with beehiiv’s one-click polls.
For example, when my newsletter was brand new, I sent out a poll asking my subscribers what they wanted to learn more about.
It may be a small data sample, but the majority of readers wanted to hear more about email ghostwriting; so I took that into account when crafting my newsletter content later on.
The same goes for your content strategy. If you want people to open your emails, you need to write content that’s worth reading.
Spend some time doing audience research. Try beehiiv polls. Ask your audience on social media. I did this on X (formerly Twitter), in addition to my beehiiv poll.
The more you understand your audience and what they want, the better you’ll be able to craft relevant content that keeps them engaged and opening your emails.
3. Segmentation
Once you’ve done some audience research, you’ll understand some core content pillars to focus on in your newsletter.
Your audience has a core set of problems, desires, needs, and wants. You know roughly what kind of content resonates with them.
But if you want to take your open rates to the next level, you need to start segmenting your list.
You shouldn’t be sending every email to every single person on your list every time you hit send.
You should be segmenting your audience to ensure that you’re only sending the most relevant emails to the right people.
Within the core topics you focus on in your newsletter, you likely have different sub-groups of audience members who care more about one topic over the other.
For example, I recently launched a free course all about how to land high-ticket clients as a digital writer.
I launched the $59 course as a lead magnet. In order to get it for free, people had to enter their email address to subscribe to my newsletter.
Using beehiiv, I created an automated email that was sent to anyone who signed up to my email list for this course. In the email, I reminded them of the free course I gave them and gave them a link to get the course.
Remember earlier how I shared that my average open rate is 47.2%?
Well, look at my open rate on this automated email:
With this automated email, I got a 59% open rate, which is 25% higher than my average open rate. What does this mean?
When you send emails that are extremely timely, relevant, and targeted, you’re going to get higher open rates.
The 412 people who signed up for this free course only make up a fraction of my audience of 1,800+, but I know that this segment of my audience is highly interested in understanding how to land clients.
So if I want to create more content strictly about client acquisition, I’m likely to get higher open rates if I only send that content to this segment of my audience.
For example, I could create content on landing clients in the following ways:
One-off email newsletter
Free educational email course
Another free course in the same format as the first
A paid course
If you want to increase your open rates, look for different ways you can segment your audience based on their specific interests and needs.
beehiiv has several segmentation features that let you easily send relevant emails to subgroups of your total subscribers.
Want to improve your open rates? The B-Side daily newsletter gets 60% open rates on beehiiv as a daily newsletter. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how they got there.
4. List Hygiene
The final core factor that impacts open rates is list hygiene.
Just as it’s important to make sure to shower, brush your teeth, and shave, it’s crucial to practice proper hygiene by cleaning your email list.
What exactly does cleaning your list mean? It means removing unengaged subscribers.
If you have subscribers on your list who aren’t opening or clicking on your emails, you need to remove them. Why don’t you just keep them? If ISPs see that a high percentage of the emails you're sending to your list aren’t getting opened by your subscribers, they’re going to start flagging your account with a low sender reputation score.
The result? the ISPs are going to start placing your emails in spam and promotions folders, and they’re not just going to place emails in spam and promotions for the specific subscribers who aren’t opening your emails.
The people who consistently open your emails will be punished as well. The ISPs like Gmail and Yahoo don’t care who is opening your emails and who isn’t. They’re simply looking at how many emails you’re sending. And if they see that too many of your delivered emails aren’t being opened on a regular basis, they’ll start automatically placing them in spam.
Why would ISPs place your emails in spam? To protect consumers.
Gmail and Yahoo aren’t out to get email newsletter operators and business owners. They’re trying to filter out actual scammers and spammers who are sending bad, fraudulent, or unwanted emails.
If ISPs don’t protect their customers (Gmail and Yahoo email users), their customers will go with someone else, so you’ve got to make sure that you have a clean list to maintain a good sender reputation. There are two ways to do this:
1. Manually Clean Your List.
With beehiiv, you can create a segment of subscribers who haven’t opened an email in a set time period. I created a segment of any subscribers who hadn’t opened or clicked any of my emails in the last 60 days.
To do this, I went to my beehiiv dashboard, clicked Audience and Segments. Then, I created a new segment.
I added a few conditions to ensure that I filter out anyone who hasn’t engaged.
The result is a segment of 207 subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on a single email in the previous 2 months, so I’m going to clean them from my list since they’re essentially dead weight (and hurting my sender reputation).
But rather than simply unsubscribing these people, I’m going to give them one last chance to stay on my list. To do this, I’m going to send a newsletter only to this segment and let them know that I’m removing them from my email list unless they take action on the email.
In a few days, I’ll simply manually unsubscribe anyone who received that email and didn’t open or click.
2. Automatically Clean Your List.
There’s another way to clean your list that can save you a ton of time.
Use beehiiv’s automatic list-cleaning tool through beehiiv automations.
With beehiiv, you can simply set and forget your list cleaning, so it’s done for you. Rather than having to manually unsubscribe unengaged readers, beehiiv can send out a re-engagement email to try to recapture subscribers.
Then, subscribers who don’t engage with that email will be automatically unsubscribed.
To set up automatic list cleaning with beehiiv, check out our complete guide.
Boost Open Rates With beehiiv Today
If you want to lead a successful newsletter strategy, you need to focus on improving open rates.
It doesn’t matter how big your list is if your subscribers aren’t opening your emails.
By taking action on the key factors that impact open rates, you’ll be well on your way to getting your subscribers to click on your emails when they land in their inboxes.
Ready to take your newsletter engagement to the next level?
beehiiv can boost your open rates.
With beehiiv, you get these valuable features:
World-class newsletter editor
Robust segmentation features
Endless automations
Advanced analytics
Stay on top of your email newsletter strategy and begin boosting your open rates.
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