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35 Comments

What is your % open rate?

I send a 2x weekly newsletter. What is considered a good open rate?

  1. 3

    The Indie Hackers newsletter is about 20% for 70,000 subscribers. I do miss the days when we had 30-40% numbers ๐Ÿ˜ญ We might need to prune inactives soon to get back there.

    1. 1

      ๐Ÿ˜‚ that's super interesting though.

      Have you seen a steady decline in open rate as the # subscribers grew?

  2. 3

    Mine hovers 42-55%. I do think it depends on the tech stack. I use Substack and I know for a fact that some subscribers aren't even receiving the newsletter. My dad subscribes, is on the list, and hasn't received an issue in a few months.

    1. 1

      Good to know, I'm also on Substack.

    2. 1

      Could this be getting caught in spam? Think raises an interesting point

      1. 1

        No, I specifically went with him over the phone to check his spam and junk folders - nothing there.
        I love that Substack makes it so easy for creators but it's garbage tech. Besides this sending issue, I am unable to export my subscriber list (keep getting errors), I lose posts, and who knows what else is going on that I'm not aware of.
        I'm building out my website and moving away from Substack.
        I don't want to sound too negative because I would never have started my newsletter without Substack but the tech & customer service (is there even customer service?) leaves much to be desired.

        1. 1

          Ah fair enough, I was looking to try and be able to send out follow ups to those who haven't opened the original letter and doesn't seem like that's do-able either. So isn't the best.

          But it is good for getting started like you said.

          What you moving towards as an alternative?

          1. 1

            I am still exploring alternative tech stacks. I'm building out the website in WordPress. For e-mail I'll probably go with ConvertKit or something along those lines.

  3. 3

    My weekly newsletter has a 64.2% open rate over the past 90 days.

    1. 1

      That's impressive Paolo. Do you do anything to optimize the open rate?

      1. 2

        Thanks but other metrics are a bit less impressive, e.g. the subscriber count is low and flat.

  4. 2

    Just saw this, with no optimisations at all it floats at 35-55%. I think it's very variable depending on Gmails algorithm unfortunately...

  5. 2

    My weekly newsletter dailydevlinks is at 47.24% open rate with 400+ subscribers.

    I managed to increase this over time:

    • Remove inactive subscribers
    • Get highly engaged people to subscribe. I do this in a couple of ways. 1) Start to build in public and connect with other people that have similar interests. 2) Make your newsletter into a Twitter digest (example)
    1. 1

      Great tips, thanks

  6. 2

    I'm on substack and its between 40-50%

  7. 2

    I have 3 newsletters on Substack. They average anywhere between 45%-55%.

  8. 2

    I have 202 subscribers. I used to sent out a weekly newsletter about starting a random business. IE becoming a VA, SEO marketer, etc.. It was a step by step on how to set up your website to making your content to market your business.

    My opening rate was 39% and with like 28% click through rate.

    I got bored with my ADD and i stop with working on this newsletter. =( I don't know if my stats are good or not..

  9. 2

    It depends on your industry, how big your list is, how often you're cleaning subscribers.

    Typically for large lists, the open rates tend to drop.

    Here's a resource by Mailchimp

    1. 1

      This Mailchimp resource is great, thanks.

  10. 2

    I'm running Virtual Mojito on a bi-weekly basis. About to send the 20th episode, I usually get 38%-45% open rate. I have a list of 300 selected readers.

    It's hard to tell what would be a good rate. But I am happy with the result so far :)

    1. 1

      Thanks for the share. I've also been growing my newsletter and trying to figure out what open rate to expect.

  11. 2

    Avg. open rate over 2 years for my newsletter is 16.42%per campaign. Recently, I've been optimizing the subject line and content a bit more, so the rate has become 20+%. Still lots of room for improvement.

    I heard somewhere that the industry rate is 30%.

    1. 1

      I've been thinking about optimizing the subject line too. Any strategies that worked well?

      1. 2

        For me, something with number and emoji in the subject line does better. For eg: Three simple steps to...

        1. 1

          thanks, will give it a try

  12. 2

    33-37% open rate for my version.

      1. 1

        Anywhere from 10-16% for my free version and 40-50% for my paid version. I do a Trends.vc style of newsletter so my paying subscribers are way more engaged as you would expect.

  13. 2

    My weekly newsletter has a 64.2% open rate over the past 90 days. Here are some tips:-

    Keep Your List Fresh.
    Segment Your List.
    Avoid Spam Filters.
    Perfect Your Timing.

    1. 2

      @sophiagracia What steps did you take to perfect your timing?

    2. 1

      Great tips, thank you. I found that the timing part is important as well.

  14. 2

    @meeks2 We've got about 30% and trying to look at methods to improve that.

    1. 1

      Yeah, I'm looking to improve as well - hoping to optimize the subject line and timing.

  15. 2

    Mine is around 45/55%. It depends, for really big lists anything over 20% is good, for smaller ones I'd try to stay above 40%.

    1. 1

      Thanks, Andrea that's good to know. My rate was around 50% when we were sending weekly but fell when we moved to 2x a week.

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