MBA1580 Q&A Wednesday: What’s a good email open rate for my business?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show. Cause building a business is a challenge. That's why we got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zed home. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar@100mba.net. Today's question is from Oscar and Oscar asks, hey Omar, Love the podcast. I just started doing email marketing, sending an email newsletter to my list every single week. I've been doing it for three months now but I'm not sure if my open rates are what they should be. What is a good email open rate for my business? Thanks. Love the podcast. Keep it coming Oscar. Thanks for the question Oscar. It's a very common question actually. A lot of people want to know how well they're performing with email marketing. They want to know if open rates are on par with the market or just some sort of gauge. I know that every industry is different, but we all want to know where we stand and I think that's fair enough. And we'll explore what are the average open rates that you should be aiming for as well as the click through rates you should be looking for as well. People clicking on links and in the emails themselves. There's a lot I want to discuss with this question. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Oscar wants to know what's a good open rate for his email marketing emails. Right. He's been doing it for three months now. He's growing his email list and he wants to make sure he's hitting the mark. Well, first of all, Oscar, I commend you for actually wanting to know what you should be shooting for. You want to measure so you can manage, right? Peter Drucker there's been a lot of research on this topic. A lot of companies have done a lot of research. I've read a lot about this from HubSpot to Campaign Monitor to activecampaign. So I want to share with you the most recent study that was done by Campaign Monitor just in this year, in 2020. And they studied all industries and they came up with an average across all industries when it comes to open rates. And they have found that the open rate on average for all industries on average of course is 17.8. Yep, 17.8% of the people you send an email to will open your emails. Of course. Again, every industry is different, every niche is different, every market is different. But again, we're looking for a number on average so we can aim for. So anything above 17.8% is gravy. Now you might be surprised by that number. Wow, that's a pretty low percentage that not even 1/5 of all people. I send emails on my email list. Open the email. Well, I want you to take that with a grain of salt. Why? Because email marketing is not exactly an exact science when it comes to open rates. Why? Because a lot of email clients like Gmail, like Yahoo, like Outlook, the people that actually receive emails and put it into people's inboxes, they don't actually give predictable, accurate information about if the email was read was opened. There are even new services like hey which will block any tracking. So that percentage, 17.8% is based on what they know, based on what they can track. It's probably higher than that. But we need a number to go by and that's the number we're gonna go by. 17.8%. The way every email client handles, every email is different. But There are ways for you to improve your open rate. One of the ways is to make sure it actually goes into the inbox at the promo folder or spam. And one of the easiest ways to do that is your first email out to your email list or subscriber. Like, as soon as they subscribe, ask them to reply with something they're struggling with, with a question. Answer a question that you're going to ask them. So you can say, hey, welcome to my email list. I have one question for you. Hit reply and answer it. What is the biggest struggle you're having right now in xyz? Or what are you looking for in a product? Or what's your T shirt size? We do giveaways sometimes and I want to make sure that I have it on file. The point here is that you want them to reply to the email. By replying to the email, it whitelists your email. It makes sure that every time you email them, it goes to their inbox. It tells Gmail or whoever who's handling their email. Hey, these people I know, I'm emailing them back and forth. So if you can get them to reply to you, that is going to be gold. It's going to improve the deliverability, it's going to improve the visibility in the inbox and therefore the open rate. Now, sometimes at the start, your open rate is not that high. Especially when you're starting with email marketing, that's okay, as long as you see the trend moving up. So if your open rate right now is, let's say, 13%, but your next email is 13.2, and your next email is 13.8 and the next one is 15, you get the point. You want to see the trend moving up. Okay. And that has a lot to do with your copywriting your subject lines. Your subject lines are huge because that's the invite to, hey, you're going to want to read this email to entice them to open it. It's where you sell people with one line. The actual email itself has to be well written. It has to be interesting, it has to be fun, it has to be somewhat entertaining. Because if it is, they will open the next one and the next one and the next one. I'm on a lot of email lists and there are only a handful of the emails. I would say I'm on about 50 email lists and I would say only three or four of them. I make sure I open every single time they're in my inbox because I love their emails. They're so well written. There are masterclasses for me in copywriting, so I just read them because I think they're just a joy to read and a great example of some good copy. So you gotta be one of those three or four that I would open, you know, that kind of email. The better the email, the better the open rate. Now you want them to take action in an email often like click on a link, you know, whether it's to subscribe to your podcast or to, you know, to register for a webinar or to take on an offer or to check out your latest blog post. Campaign Monitor also published a average click through rate across all industries and that's 2.6%. That means 2.6% of all people that have received your email you sent an email to will click on a link. So anything above that gravy. So what you want to do is sell the click, make it enticing, tease them, get them curious about what's on the other side. A lot of people just spill the beans about. This is what my latest blog post is all about. And the whole blog post is pretty much in the email. Well, no, what you want to do is you want to tease them. Hey, have you ever wondered about this? Or this or this? Are you struggling with that? Well, I actually came up with some great solutions to those problems. Check it out on this latest blog post. That gets them to click and that drives traffic to your website. That increases your SEO, increases a lot of things. That helps of course, get them to read your content and become more of a loyal audience member and eventually a customer. Now I want to remind you that your click through rate and your open rate should be higher for members or customers versus non members or customers. So if you have an email list or email lists, you usually have one list for people that are not customers yet and a list of people that have bought from you before. Customers. So if somebody bought from you before or is continuing to buy from you, whether they're on a subscription or they're a member of your, you know, your community, they're more likely to open the email and click on a link. So your rates should be higher for those people. So that's why I like to separate my lists from members and non members. That way I can really compare apples to oranges and understand who is doing what. So it's not mixed up. So if you're sending out a newsletter, have the newsletter sent out to your non members first, then your members and then you can compare and see. Okay, I see my members are more active and that's what it should be versus my non members. Another way to look at this is that your customers or past customers are warm. They like you already. They know you. They trust you. They're more likely to spend time to read your emails and take action.

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It takes Q and A Wednesday's question from Oscar According to Campaign Monitor's recent study here, in 2020 the average open rate is 17.8% and the average click through rate is 2.6%. Anything above that is great. You want to aim for that, especially for your non customers. For us and in our business, we always try to go for 20% or higher for open rate and click through rate of 3% or more and it's a challenge. But you need to kind of try to tweak things in your emails, in your subject lines, in your calls to action to improve these rates. One email after another. What's great about email marketing is that you get to learn from each email and you have next week and next week and next week to try to improve. Thanks Oscar for the great question. I hope it helped you and helped everybody else who's listening. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar@100mba.net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you love the show, make sure you leave us an iTunes rating and review. We read every single review. And by leaving us a review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. Programs you can get free access by just leaving us a review and listening. On Friday, you might win. You'll hear the random draw. It's that simple. Every single week, somebody wins. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Email marketing is played in the long term. It's a long game. It's about consistency. It's about building a relationship with your subscribers. It's about being authentic and yourself and understanding. It's going to take some time for me to get somebody from interested to a buyer, so have the foresight to understand. This takes time, be patient and see it as an opportunity to improve. Every single week there are people on my email list that did not buy a single thing for years and then three, four, five years later they become a customer because I didn't give up on them. I kept on going. They kept on opening my emails, they kept on reading it and when they're ready, I was top of mind. So make sure you do the same. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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