STOP focusing on increasing your Open Rates!

Everyone keeps preaching about ways to improve your open rates and they are missing the boat on what the focus should really be on.

I’m sure you already know the story that open rates are no longer reliable, and neither are click rates for that matter.

With the influx of email bots, Apple’s mail privacy protection, and email scanning by inbox providers open rates are hugely inflated.

Please do me a favor and answer the poll below so we can get an idea of the average open rates for the people who subscribe to my newsletter.

Thank you for submitting the poll. 🤪 If you haven’t please click one of the answers above.

To give you an idea, the average open rates of all my newsletters (12 of them) that have at least 100K+ subscribers are 50-60%.

So the question is… Are you wasting your time using multi-variant testing for your subject lines?

From years of email marketing experience, especially in the newsletter space, I believe the answer to that is, Yes!

Let me give you 3 reasons why that’s the case.

1) Inflated Stats - A large percentage of your open stats are from the 3 culprits mentioned above. These subscribers will not be affected by the different subject lines so your percentage increase overall will be minimal.

2) Average Range - Looking through email open rates on many of my newsletters, they are all within a certain range. My 6 am newsletter has an open rate between 55-58%. My 7 pm newsletter has open rates between 51-56%. I’ve used multi-variant testing and they always fall within these same ranges.

3) The Brand Itself - Your brand recognition accounts for a large percentage of your opens. If you have a trusted brand with an active subscriber base your open rates will tend to stay consistent.

4) Sample Size - Most newsletter operators I see using multi-variant testing are doing so with such a small newsletter size. If you have less than 10K subscribers and you are doing a test on 20% of the list, that’s only 1K subs getting subject line A and 1K subs getting subject line B.

Is that a large enough sample to truly see a winner? I don’t believe so. I’ve run tests where the winning subject line was sent to the remaining subscribers and the overall performance of the open rates dropped below the losing subject line.

Testing is great, but all factors must be accounted for and your list size should be the greatest one.

What we really should be using open rates for is to monitor our email deliverability.

As I showed previously, your open rates over time will fall into a set range. This range should be identified as your average open rates.

By knowing your average open rates, you can easily identify if you are having an issue hitting the inbox.

Identifying an outlier in your average stats you can dig in to see what the issue is.

Looking at it a level deeper by ISP I can easily see that this email didn’t inbox like normal on Yahoo and AOL (which are part of the same company and use the same filters).

Luckily it went back to normal on the next send and there was nothing to worry about.

But if you see the open rate stay below your average open rates, you need to tighten up your segments to shorten the engagement window for all Yahoo and AOL email subscribers on your list.

I broke down in a previous newsletter how you can create segments based on different ISPs which you can read here 👉 Not All Inboxes Are The Same!

The key factor to improving your open rates is making sure you're hitting the inbox!

Instead of trying to squeeze the juice out of every subject line, just monitor your open rates to make sure you are still in the inbox, and not having deliverability issues.

I’ve mentioned this time and time again to people on X (formerly Twitter) when asking how to improve open rates.

All these other gurus continuously give advice like:

• Run A/B tests regularly to find what resonates best.

• Optimize send times.

• Segment your audience.

• Use engaging preview text.

• Personalize your subject line.

It’s good to find out what works best as far as your standard subject line formats.

But focusing on it on every send isn’t the needle mover you should be focusing on.

Don’t get lured into all these different techniques and just keep your eye on the inbox.

I’d rather have an average open rate above industry standards than have one banger open rate a month.

DISCLAIMER: All of the info provided assumes you follow best email practices including using a base sending segment so that you can identify what your average open rates are historically.

Open your eyes! 👀

Chris Miquel
Co-Founder of SoVi Digital

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris

and on LinkedIn: chrismiquel