Email Open Rate Guide: How To Boost Email Opens

Email open rate measures how many subscribers actually open your messages—and it directly affects how much revenue your email campaigns generate. 

If you’re an ecommerce business owner, boosting your email open rate can pay off. Navid Jilow, director of technology at legacy apparel brand Belstaff, says that his company uses customer data to design campaigns that drive engagement. 

“Over 30% of our customers come from email,” he says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

Understanding how email open rates work can help ecommerce business owners design and run successful email marketing campaigns. Read on to learn how to calculate your open rate, improve it, and use it to boost website traffic and increase revenue.

What is email open rate?

Email open rate (a.k.a. click-to-open rate) is an email marketing performance metric that tracks the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open. Marketers calculate this metric by tallying unique opens and successfully delivered emails and plugging them into this formula:

Email open rate = (Unique opens / Total number of emails delivered) x 100

Here’s an overview of each variable:

• Unique opens. This is the total number of individual recipients who open your email. It’s distinct from total opens, a larger figure that tallies both unique opens and multiple opens by the same recipient. 

• Total number of emails delivered. Open rate is based on delivered emails, not sent emails. Emails that bounce due to address errors or delivery issues can’t be opened, so they aren’t included in your score. 

You can find both of these metrics in your email marketing platform’s performance reports or analytics dashboard. Such platforms track emails opened, delivered, and bounced, reporting them as either totals or rates. If your platform uses delivery rates, you can calculate the number of emails delivered using the following formulas:

Total number of emails delivered = Total number of emails sent x (Delivery rate / 100)

Total number of emails delivered = Total number of emails sent x [1 - (Bounce rate / 100)]

Some email marketing platforms (including Shopify Messaging) also directly report email open rates.

Why does email open rate matter?

A strong email open rate is critical for effective email marketing, and it can be a powerful driver of sales. Laura Thompson of natural skin care brand Three Ships says that email accounts for roughly 35% of the company’s revenue. This means its email open rates significantly impact its earnings. Messages can drive traffic to an online store only if recipients open them.

Email open rates can also help you better understand your business’s customer journey, especially when combined with email delivery rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Taken together, these metrics can help you understand how customers move through your email marketing funnel and where they fall off. For example:

• Email delivery rate. Are your emails being delivered successfully?

• Email open rate. Are the people who receive your emails opening them?

• Click-through rate (CTR). Are the people who open your emails clicking on embedded links?

• Conversion rate. Is email-generated traffic to your online store resulting in sales? 

A strong email open rate and a poor average click-through rate, for example, suggest customers are interested in your pitch and subject lines are compelling, but email content is ineffective. You might focus your efforts on body copy, design, and calls to action (CTAs).

What is a good email open rate?

Average email open rates vary by industry, audience, and campaign type, but 20% to 22% is considered a strong open rate for general email marketing benchmarking.

Reported open rates are also an imperfect representation of actual open rates, due to the complexity of tracking. Platforms track opens using invisible pixel images that register emails as opened when they’re loaded. If a recipient views an email in preview mode or as plain text, their email client won’t load the embedded image, and the email marketing platform won’t catch the open. 

Security and privacy tools can also affect tracking accuracy. Tracker-blocking and image-blocking technology can lead to undercounting, and proxy server opens can artificially elevate numbers.

Ways to improve your email open rate

• Build a high-quality email marketing list
• Maximize deliverability
• Experiment with content types
• Use customer data to tailor content
• Create automated content funnels

Email open rates rely on a range of technical and strategic factors—including mailbox provider-friendly formatting and email-specific CTAs that appeal to your target audience. Here are five ways to maximize total opens and ensure that a strong rate works in your favor:

Build a high-quality email marketing list

An effective email marketing strategy starts with building a quality email marketing list. You’ll see higher average email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates if your email subscriber list accurately reflects your business’s target audience. Total email subscriber numbers matter too: Your ultimate goal is to boost your total opens by maximizing both open rates and list size.

You can use Shopify Forms to build your list and collect subscriber information. This tool allows you to embed lead capture forms directly into your Shopify website, includes multiple display options, and supports custom fields. This allows you to collect the information you need to boost open rates with tailored subject lines and delivery schedules.

Maximize deliverability

Improving your email delivery rate means your email shows up in more subscribers’ inboxes. Shopify clients using Shopify Messaging can turn on Smart Delivery, which maximizes deliverability and lowers campaign costs by only targeting engaged subscribers. The platform also includes automatic bot filtering and list hygiene functions. 

Shopify maintains a list of email deliverability best practices to help users improve sender reputations, reduce unsubscribe rates, and avoid the spam folder, with tips like:

• Get opt-in consent. All contacts in your database should actively opt in to receive emails. Ideally, get double opt-in consent to confirm subscriber intent before adding anyone to your marketing lists.

• Regularly evaluate acquisition sources. If you receive complaints or bounces from emails collected via a particular ad, for example, then take steps to remove or replace it.

• Never purchase or rent contact lists. These contacts are unreliable and can hurt your delivery rate and trigger spam filters. 

Experiment with content types

Email campaign best practices include writing compelling subject lines, concise body copy, and clear calls to action, but improving open rates can also require experimentation. You can A/B test subject lines and content types to identify successful strategies. 

For example, Three Ships found success sending long-form notes. 

“One of the formats that works the best for us is actually long-form written content like founder notes,” says Laura, adding that they’re particularly valuable for explaining major changes and keeping audiences deeply engaged with the brand’s journey. 

“If we have to take a price increase, we’ll write that out as a founder note so that people feel really connected to what’s going on with the business,” she says.

Use customer data to tailor content 

You can boost open rates by using demographic or behavioral data to identify particularly relevant audience segments, such as engaged subscribers or recent purchasers. Belstaff uses Shopify Analytics to gather customer information and tailor email marketing campaigns accordingly.

“We’ve integrated our other systems with Shopify, and those systems rely on getting a complete picture of customer data to help with our email marketing campaigns,” says Navid.

Teri Johnson of Harlem Candle Co. specifically tracks customer engagement, creating a unique segment of customers who consistently “open up every email and add stuff to cart.” She rewards this VIP group of highly engaged readers with early access to new products, making them feel recognized and valued.

Create automated content funnels

Automated email sequences can increase open rates by aligning emails with a recipient’s customer journey stage. The founders of the bilingual book fair organization MiJa Books, Stephanie and Muammar Reed, set up an automated email sequence to nurture leads acquired from social media giveaways.

New leads receive a welcome email and an invitation to request a book fair before entering an email series of three to five messages a week. These emails have content designed to keep specific recipient personas (such as teachers or parents) engaged while also consistently prompting them to schedule a school book fair. 

“There are links and CTAs throughout every single email to get people to our book fair landing page,” Muammar says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

You can use Shopify Messaging to design automated email sequences. The platform has pre-built templates for common email sequences, including automated abandoned cart and welcome flows. It also integrates directly with ecommerce store data, allowing users to run email campaigns based on consumer behavioral triggers.