Open Rates Compared by Industry

At first glance these open rates seem stratospherically high, but given the composition of the associations and organizations that form the various surveys, it should not be as surprising as they first seem. Certainly to claim that just under half of all of the various associations and organizations' outgoing email marketing campaign missives and newsletters (44%) receive an open rate in excess of 40% is an eye-opening statistic and one that many commercial email marketers would only dream of, but the facts behind the statistics help us to comprehend these figures better: emails sent from an association or organization to a member who has paid an elevated fee for the privilege of being a part of that group likely have open rates approaching 100%. These emails are technically not strictly email marketing, but could be referred to as internal membership communications. Much of the value that a member seeks from the specific associations and organizations they have paid to belong to is in many cases wrapped up in their emails, thus the rest of the statistical skew to the high side seems justifiable.

The balance of the associations and organizations' open rates were 25% for 25% - 40% open, 11% for 15% - 25%, and only 7% stated that they had an open rate which did not reach 15%. Given that associations and organizations have shown themselves in this statistical survey to be fairly skilled in the art and science of email marketing, the 13% figure listed under Don't Know should not be interpreted as lack of sophistication or knowledge, but the inherent technological inability of emails that are sent in plain text format to report open rates.

As stated earlier, the open rates are considerably higher than the norm for other industries at 38.1% and above Food, a traditionally high level of open rate at 36.6%.