10 Quick Tips to Boost Your Newsletter Open Rates (+ Real Working Examples)

If you’re sending email after email, but your returns are nowhere close to the 4200% returns people keep raving about, one of the problems could be low newsletter open rates.

Those promises of unbelievably high ROIs are based on the premise that your emails are actually opened.

It’s the precursor to them being read, clicked on, and engaged with.

And while newsletters are fantastic for:

• Promoting new products
• Making sale announcements
• Strengthening customer relationships
• Reducing reliance on algorithms

Their two most significant advantages—low cost and easy availability—make them one of the most competitive digital marketing channels.

In this post, we’ll cover the average newsletter open rates from industry studies and how you can increase email open rates to match or exceed those average rates.

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What are the average newsletter open rates?

According to Statista, a whopping 333 billion emails are projected to be sent in 2022.

It’s not surprising, then, that another 2020 study puts the global email open rates at an average of 18%.

But there is newer, fresher data, along with industry-specific stats, that tells you exactly how you fare against peers.

We looked at six studies—from Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Get Response, Influencer Marketing Hub, HubSpot, and Mail Chimp between October 2019 and June 2022—and this is what we found:

1. Constant Contact

• As of June 2022, the average email open rate is 30.35%.
• Religious organizations and childcare have the highest number of opens at 38-40%.
• Technology and financial services are the lowest-performing industries at 20-21%.

2. Campaign Monitor

• As of December 2021, the average open rate is 21.5%.
• The best-performing industries are education and farming, with open rates of 27-28%.
• Retail, fitness, and politics trail behind at 17-20% open rates.

3. GetResponse

• December 2021 data puts the average newsletter open rate at 22.02%.
• Non-profits and restaurants are the top industries. Their open rates are 30%.
• Marketing and communications had the lowest open rates of 15% and 19%, respectively.

4. Influencer Marketing Hub

• The average open rate in 2021 was 17%.
• Religious organizations, government, and education emails were among the highest-opened, with rates between 28-29%.
• Automotive services, training and consultancy, and retail had some of the lowest open rates (9-11%).

5. HubSpot

• The average newsletter open rate across industries was 21.72% as of June 2021.
• Education, manufacturing, finance, and retail enjoyed the highest opens of around 23-25%.
• Technology, telecommunication, and business services had the least open rates of 19-20%.

6. MailChimp

• At the end of October 2019, the average email open rate was 21.33%.
• Emails from government, hobbies, and religion-related senders had the highest open rates (27-28%).
• Health supplements, e-coupons, and ecommerce emails had open rates of roughly 15%.

Analysis of average email open rates studies

Though varying in parts, the industries most commonly observed to have the best open rates are:

1. Religion
2. Education
3. Government

The industries with the lowest open rates are:

1. Internet marketing
2. Electronics
3. Technology

The average of all the average open rates as per all six studies is 22.32%.

The upward trend of email open rates

With the exception of the Influencer Marketing Hub study, open rates remained in the 20-22% range till the end of last year.

However, they have since shot up to 30.35% (as shown in Constant Contact’s June 2022 data). The sudden rise coincides with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) update on iOS15.

This feature pre-fetches the images in your email, leading to virtually every email sent to an iOS15 user with MPP enabled to count as a unique email open.

When compared to Statista’s 2020 open rate of 18% (prior to the iOS15 launch in September 2021), the average open rates across email service providers (ESPs) are higher by at least 10%.

What this means for brands

In recent years, there’s been a crackdown on the collection of third-party cookies and non-consented, irrelevant email outreach.

With the iOS update, open rate statistics will continue to remain skewed. Privacy is also becoming increasingly important, and the trend is unlikely to reverse.

But the end goals of a higher open rate—an increasing click-to-open rate (even more important than click-through rate), creating brand awareness and loyalty, and driving engagement and conversions—remain the same and will need the same measures to address and improve them.

With these email marketing benchmarks in mind, let’s get into some strategies for making those email campaigns successful.

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10 Ways to improve your newsletter open rates (+ examples for inspiration)

Email newsletters have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in an inbox in the first place.

Since the open rate is linked to a lot of other metrics, for them just to sit there, buried under an avalanche of similar commercial emails, is an unpalatable loss of both time and effort.

Here’s how you can spruce up your newsletters to give them a fighting chance of being opened.

Craft personalized and compelling subject lines

Subject lines have a lot riding on them.

70% of users decide whether to open an email based on subject lines alone and in crowded inboxes, first impressions are everything.

To write better subject lines:

Get rid of all the spammy words. No percentages or dollar signs or SCREAMING AT YOUR SUBSCRIBERS in hysterics!!!!!

Use fresher words like rare, reserved, essential, or exclusive to create a sense of importance and urgency.

A case in point is Bellroy’s short, high-impact subject line.

Create interest. Write subject lines the way you text friends. You don’t need to use Title Case, or trick users into opening emails by lying to them.

Use unfinished sentences like ‘I couldn’t possibly’ or ask a question—‘are we still on for tomorrow?’ with no regard for capitalization.

June does exactly that, with an emoji thrown in for good measure.

Don’t stretch it. If vague subject lines in lowercase don’t match your brand voice, do the opposite. Speak facts, and write the important words first to avoid them being lost to truncation.

Subject lines containing the words ‘Newsletter’ or ‘20% Off Coupon Inside’ give a straightforward idea of the contents and pave the way for more opens.

Don’t waste a pre-header text

Pre-header texts can give the last nudge your subscribers need to open your newsletter.

They’re tucked into the neat little space right underneath the subject line in a mobile inbox and enjoy high visibility.

On bigger devices, they show next to the subject line.

Preheader texts are usually generated from the first line of an email, but customizing them to top off your subject line can come in handy.

If your subject line makes it hard to guess the contents of the email, or if a recipient is hard-pressed for time (most of them are), the pre-header text can provide them with enough context to decide the relevance of the email.

Most mobile devices display between 30-50 characters, so the first few words of your pre-header are crucial in clinching the deal.

Improve email deliverability

Email deliverability measures the number of emails that actually make it to a recipient’s inbox, meaning it doesn’t include emails that land in spam or promotional folders.

So even though your delivery rate is in the high 90s, your deliverability rate could still be low leading to fewer opens.

If your emails have been authenticated with security protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, it increases the likelihood of sensitive spam filters and mail servers trusting them and granting them entry to an inbox.

A personalized sender name, like ‘Boris from Hunter’ instead of just Hunter, makes your emails seem less anonymous.

Most importantly, comply with data protection laws and put consent above all else.

Market only to people that want to be marketed to, and always include an unsubscribe link in your emails.

Your email open rate will not be well-served by continuing to push emails to inactive subscribers that can’t figure out how to unsubscribe.

Mobile-first focus

We look at our phones a lot, almost compulsively.

It’s no wonder, then, that nearly 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile. If people are visiting your website and making purchases from their phones, you can be certain they’re not going to use a computer just to read your emails.

In fact, the younger your customers, the greater the need for mobile-optimized emails.

A single-column design and CTA buttons ensure easy visibility. Misc. Goods uses both in their email here.

Responsive design will make sure your users don’t have to pinch and zoom and copy-paste links to their browsers to read your email content.

Scalable images that display seamlessly across different devices are a must.

But including too many images will increase your email size, making it load slower. Keep a 60:40 ratio between text and images to get the message across to users that have their images turned off.

Personalize your email copy

Theoretically, you could use cookie-cutter templates to blast emails at everyone on your list and hope to build meaningful enough customer relationships that translate into sales.

Just the way you could use a fork to drink soup. Common sense and efficiency are overrated anyway, right?

Most businesses use names, locations, birthdays, user activity, or some combination of these for personalized messaging.

That way, you’re making your emails about them, not you.

If you’re feeling experimental, try gamification or interactive templates like scratch coupons. Quizzes are a hit with users, too.

But don’t let that fool you into thinking that text-only emails can’t be every bit as effective.

Who Gives A Crap proves plain-text email detractors wrong with their stellar writing on this one.

The takeaway is to treat each email like a one-on-one conversation. Warmth resonates with prospects and builds you a base of returning customers.

Segment your audience

Segmentation and personalization make users feel understood and are key to better engagement. When you segment your email lists, it also makes it easier to pinpoint problems.

Does your store have a lot of browsers but not enough buyers?

That means you need special offers targeting revisiting users. If that’s not an option, provide incentives for reviews and then put those reviews in your emails to inspire trust in your brand.

If your primary issue is churn, then you need to focus on your re-engagement communication. Send users tips for using a product better, along with product links you can up-sell or cross-sell to them.

These campaigns can also be run simultaneously. But micro-segmentation can backfire, so don’t make your segments too granular.

Demographics are a good place to start differentiating users. Invest in resources to use their activity and engagement level to send relevant content.

Once you’ve figured out their intent, use specially created landing pages to drive traffic and conversions.

The Ridge used Shogun’s Page Builder for a $2.5 million uptick in revenue.

Clean your email lists

Not cleaning your email list isn’t just lazy; it’s dangerous.

If your list has a lot of deadweight (think spambots, invalid email addresses, or misspelled ones), it will tank your deliverability rate.

When a lot of your emails are being sent to recipients who either can’t or won’t receive them, it makes ISPs and spam filters wary of you.

They start proactively blocking your emails, leading your open rate to drop even further.

And there’s no magic cure to keep email lists from shedding. What you can do is maintain the quality of your list by monitoring bounce rates and verifying the email addresses on it.

Logic dictates that the longer your list, the more prone it is to decay.

So if your list has tens of thousands of addresses, clean it monthly or quarterly. If it’s shorter than that, you can get away with email scrubbing a couple of times a year.

Find the best time to send your newsletters

The beauty and success of ecommerce hinges on the near-instant ability of a customer to make a purchase.

The ultimate goal of your newsletters, no matter what they’re masquerading as, is to close that sale.

Analyzing previous campaign data and user activity can help you decide the best time to send an email for your business.

Automation is useful when it comes to emailing customers at a particular time based on their location.

Morning and post-lunch hours work well for most emails.

But the best time for sending an email is industry-dependent.

For example, emails marketing leisure products would be better received on Friday afternoons or Saturday mornings.

But if you sell fitness gear, you’d be better off sending your emails bright and early on a Monday morning.

And when you do send them, make sure the tone is time-appropriate.

Send longer round-ups on Fridays or Saturdays because people generally have more time to read them then.

A Wednesday morning email, on the other hand, should be crisp and to the point to ensure it gets read even if your subscribers have a lot on their plate.

Optimize your sign-up process

And no, we’re not just talking about single-field forms, although they are phenomenal at streamlining the sign-up process.

Before deciding the number of questions to ask potential subscribers in your form (each question is a hurdle, so the fewer, the better), check your deliverability stats.

Find a balance between collecting first-party data like user location (that iOS15 will make difficult to obtain) and making signing up easier.

A low-quality list can benefit from double opt-ins that filter out uninterested users and fake/incorrect email addresses.

Just make sure you’re reminding users to verify their subscriptions right after they’ve signed up.

And if you promised them a freebie or discount in return, follow through on the offer you made at the time of signing up.

If you’re using a new domain, ask subscribers to add your email address to their contacts to build sender reputation.

Your first email can redirect them to a preference center that lets them choose their areas of interest.

And just because they’ve agreed to receive emails from you now doesn’t mean they’ve pledged lifelong allegiance to you. Don’t inundate prospects with bare-bones sales pitches.

Instead, create email sequence templates that add value through each message you send.

Always split test your campaigns

When you make these changes to your newsletter campaigns, you will start seeing improvements.

But if you’re not studying and measuring what’s working for you and what isn’t, you have no way of replicating it.

Implement these strategies one at a time, and A/B test variations to figure out the winners.

Experiment to see which subject-line and pre-header text combos get the most opens. Or if Tuesday afternoons are indeed the best time to send that follow-up email.

The non-iOS user open rate is still around 20%. So even subtle differences in open rates should be given due consideration.

Remember, the more you test, the closer you’ll get to perfecting your campaign.

Make the right moves to increase your newsletter open rates

As the data on unique opens becomes murkier, interactive emails or emails with clickable links will become more important than ever.

They will provide the only reliable source of information on whether your email was opened.

This also puts pressure on landing pages to keep the momentum going. A lackluster landing page will waste the effort put into the emails.

On the other hand, if your landing page is aligned with the messaging and tone of your newsletter, it’ll bring leads closer to conversion, the ultimate goal of any outreach campaign.

You can consider creating separate workflows or sequences for iOS vs non-iOS users, especially where opening an email is one of the behavioral triggers involved.

But regardless of the recipient, these strategies will help you design powerful newsletter campaigns that pack a punch and open pathways to higher open rates and sales.

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