Whether your email subscriber base is 500, 5,000 or 50,000, you often consider that number to be the number of people reading your newsletter.

How wrong you are.

According to an article at Constant Contact called Understanding Open Rates: How Open Rates Are Measured and Tips for Increasing Yours, B2C (business to consumer) emails get opened 30% – 39% of the time, while B2B emails are opened a paltry 10% – 29%.

The article does a good job explaining open rates, how not all opens are recognized by the software, and why open rates tend to go down over time. (I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself; last year our open rate was in the high forties, more recently it hovers around 40%.)

There are also some tips in how to increase your open rates, but nothing ground breaking. Improve your subject lines, make sure your "from" line is recognizable, try testing different sending times, send more targeted emails and evaluate how often you send.

While open rates as low as 10% may make the whole process seem not worth the bother, keep in mind that your ultimate business goal is to sell more products and services, not to have a giant subscriber list. Email marketing may be for direct sales or it may be to warm up prospects to your offerings.

You can contact flyte for more help with your own email newsletter or get started yourself.

Rich Brooks
Email Marketing for Small Business