What is the Open Rate?

The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open an email. Open rate = (unique opens / emails delivered) x 100%. It is the first KPI that shows whether your subject lines and sender name are effective at getting people to open.

What affects the open rate?

Subject line, preview text (the first sentence after the subject line), sender name, send time and deliverability. A personal sender name (e.g. “Don from ROXTAR”) performs better than a generic company name.

Open rate and Apple Mail Privacy Protection

Since 2021, Apple Mail prefetches all email pixels, so every email sent to Apple users is registered as opened, whether or not it was actually opened. As a result, open rates are inflated and less reliable as an absolute metric. Focus more on reply rate and click-through rate.

Improving your open rate

Test subject lines systematically with A/B tests. Keep your list clean with regular bounce analysis. Use personalisation in the subject line and send at the moment your audience is active.

What is a good open rate?

For B2B newsletters, 25 to 35 percent is good. For cold email sequences, 40 to 60 percent is strong and achievable with good personalisation.

Why is my open rate dropping?

Possible causes: a polluted list, spam filter problems, less relevant subject lines or technical deliverability issues. More at developers.google.com/search.