A 20% open rate used to be considered decent. These days, with inbox competition at an all-time high and Apple's Mail Privacy Protection muddying the data, what counts as "good" varies wildly. But if you're consistently seeing open rates in the single digits, or if they've been steadily falling, something specific is going wrong.
The good news is that low open rates are almost always fixable. Here's a diagnostic breakdown of the most common causes and what to do about each one.
I've looked at a lot of under-performing email accounts as part of my email marketing in North Wales work, and in almost every case, the problem isn't the channel. It's one or two specific, fixable issues that nobody has addressed.
Your subject lines sound like marketing
Most marketing emails get ignored because they read like marketing emails. The subject line is the problem.
"Exciting news from [Company Name]!" Nobody opens this. "Our latest newsletter" is even worse. "Don't miss our spring sale" is in the bin before the person has consciously decided to put it there.
People open emails that look like they came from a person, not a brand. Specifically, they open emails that look like they contain something useful, interesting, or relevant to them right now.
The fix is to write subject lines the way you'd write a message to a specific person. "Quick question about your website" gets opened. "Thought this might be useful for you" gets opened. "The mistake I see most North Wales businesses make" gets opened. They're specific, they're human, and they suggest there's something worth reading inside.
Test your subject lines by imagining them in your own inbox, next to emails from your bank, your friends, and your suppliers. Would you open yours?
You're sending too infrequently
If you send an email newsletter once every three months, your subscribers have forgotten who you are by the time the next one arrives.
They signed up at some point, perhaps at an event, through your website, or after buying from you. If weeks pass with nothing, and then an email arrives from your business name, they either don't recognise it or they've lost the context of why they signed up. The result is either an ignored email or, worse, an unsubscribe or spam report.
The fix isn't to send more often for the sake of it. It's to send regularly enough that your audience remembers you. For most small businesses, once every two weeks is a reasonable minimum. Once a week is better if you have something worth saying. Monthly is too infrequent unless you're being very deliberate about the quality of each send.
You're sending too frequently
The opposite problem is also real. If you're emailing your list every other day, people tune out. They stop opening because they've learned that most of your emails aren't worth their time. Some will unsubscribe. Others will stop opening but stay on the list, dragging down your engagement metrics and eventually hurting your deliverability.
The fix is to earn each email. Every send should have a reason to exist. If you're struggling to think of something worth saying, send less often rather than filling the inbox with noise.
Your list quality is poor
A list full of people who never wanted to hear from you will never perform. This happens in two ways.
The first is buying a list. Bought lists are a terrible idea for multiple reasons. The people on them haven't consented to hear from you. Open rates will be miserable. Spam complaints will damage your sender reputation. And under GDPR, marketing to bought lists without proper consent is illegal.
The second is list decay. Even a list you built legitimately will degrade over time. People change jobs and email addresses. They lose interest. They forget why they signed up. A list that hasn't been cleaned in two or three years may have 30% or more dead or disengaged contacts dragging your metrics down.
The fix is to run a re-engagement campaign. Send a short, honest email to your least-engaged contacts, something like "We haven't heard from you in a while. Do you still want to hear from us?" Anyone who doesn't respond or click can be safely removed. A smaller, engaged list outperforms a large, stale one every time.
You're landing in the promotions tab
Gmail automatically sorts emails into Primary, Social, and Promotions tabs. If your emails are landing in Promotions, a significant chunk of your subscribers may not see them at all, or may only skim that tab occasionally.
Emails land in Promotions for several reasons: HTML-heavy templates that look like marketing material, lots of images and minimal text, subject lines with promotional language like "sale," "offer," or "% off," and sending from a domain that Gmail has associated with marketing emails over time.
The fix is to make your emails look more like personal emails. Reduce the complexity of your template. Write more text-based content. Drop the promotional language from subject lines. Ask engaged subscribers to move your emails to Primary. These steps won't guarantee you stay out of Promotions, but they help.
You're sending from a no-reply address
Sending from something like noreply@yourcompany.com sends an immediate signal: we don't want to hear from you. It removes the human element from the exchange, and it tells email clients that this is automated bulk marketing, not a person communicating with another person.
Send from a real name and real email address. "Mike at Beyond Goat" coming from mike@beyondgoat.co.uk will outperform "Beyond Goat Newsletter" from noreply@beyondgoat.co.uk every time. And when people reply, that's a positive engagement signal that improves your deliverability.
Open rate isn't the only number that matters
One more thing: open rate is increasingly unreliable as a standalone metric. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, means that many iOS mail users are recorded as having "opened" an email even if they haven't. Open rates are inflated as a result for any list with a significant proportion of Apple Mail users.
Click rate and reply rate are better signals. If people are clicking links in your emails or replying to them, that's genuine engagement. That's what you're aiming for.
If your open rate is high but your click rate is near zero, your subject lines are working but your content isn't. If both are low, the problem starts before anyone even opens the email.
One thing most people overlook: replies are one of the best deliverability signals available. When subscribers reply to your emails, email clients treat this as a strong indicator that your emails are wanted. Asking a genuine question in your emails, something people might actually answer, improves deliverability over time. It's free and almost nobody does it.
For help with what to actually send, what should I send to my email list is a good starting point. And if you want to build more automation into your email marketing so the right messages go to the right people at the right time, email automation for small businesses covers how that works in practice.
If you'd like me to take a look at what's happening with your email marketing, email marketing is one of the services I offer to North Wales businesses, and a quick audit can usually identify the main issues fast.
