Increasing your open rates is a task for email marketing experts, especially in B2B email marketing. As a B2B marketer, the first crucial step in any successful email campaign is getting our foot in the door – or the inbox. In this guide, you will explore the latest B2B email open rates, statistics, and benchmarks you should know and tips to improve your B2B email open rates.
Average B2B email open rate
The 2018 DMA Email Benchmarking Report found that B2B emails had an average open rate of 15.14%, while B2C emails showed a slightly higher open rate of 19.78%. Interestingly, B2B emails outperformed B2C emails regarding click rates, with a rate of approximately 3.18%, compared to 2.09% for B2C emails. Check out all the benchmarks in this chart:
Source: DMA
What is the delivery rate for B2B and B2C emails?
The delivery rate for B2B is around 98.16%, while B2C has a delivery rate of 97.26%.
What is the click rate for B2B and B2C emails?
The click rate for B2B is around 3.18%, while B2C has a delivery rate of 2.09%.
What is the click through rate for B2B and B2C emails?
The click through rate for B2B is around 21%, while B2C has a delivery rate of 10.61%.
How to improve your B2B email open rates
As mentioned above, the average B2B email open rate is around 15.14%, and if you are getting this number, it's well and good. However, if your open rates are less than 10%, you must work on getting this number a bit higher. How do you do this? You can follow these steps to pump up your B2B email open rates:
1. Personalize the emails
Personalize the content based on user interests, pain points, or previous interactions. Personalized emails resonate better with recipients and can lead to higher open rates.
Mailmodo's email personalization tools like:
- Email copy personalization to personalize names, customer IDs, contact numbers, locations, etc.
- Dynamic image feature for showing different images for different users
- Repeatable block for different personalized elements.
Read this guide to know more about personalized emails.
2. Compelling subject lines and preheader text
Subject lines and preview text matter because they determine if the user will open the email, so you must ensure that these are to the point and compelling enough. Your subject lines should be short, personalized, and have numbers and emojis to make them compelling. Read this guide to craft an email subject line to increase your open rates.
Preview text, on the other hand, should contain unique content that builds curiosity and a clear CTA. Try not to repeat the subject line content in the preview text.
Write winning subject lines with our free ebook
Proven subject line framework to get higher opens
3. Optimize for mobile
To boost your open rates, adopting a mobile-first approach is essential. Given the significant number of people accessing emails on their mobile phones, optimizing your emails for mobile devices becomes crucial. Always prioritize creating email content that offers an excellent user experience for mobile users.
With Mailmodo, you can audit and optimize your email templates for responsiveness. You can check your email templates for responsiveness and fix errors on-fly. You can even check your template rendering for various devices and viewports using Mailmodo. You can also make images and multi-columns responsive and show or hide blocks on mobile or desktop.
💡 Related guide:
4. Experiment with timings
Timing matters when sending emails by experimenting with different days of the week to find an optimal time for sending the emails. B2B audiences may have different peak engagement periods compared to B2C audiences.
Here's our guide to finding the best time to send an email.
5. Provide value
It's important to send emails at the right time, but it's even more important to send the right content, i.e., to provide value. Offer valuable and relevant content to your audience, encouraging subscribers to open your emails to gain something useful. Once your audience knows you provide value to them, they'll open every new email you send them.
6. Avoid spammy language
Words like free, buy now, or limited-time offer are related to spam triggers and will decline your chances of landing in your audience's inboxes.
To at least reach your audience, it's important to avoid this sort of language and write excessively in capital letters, as these are spam triggers.
💡 Related guide:
7. Work on deliverability
If your users are not receiving the email, they won't read it. It's obvious. Imagine the frustration of investing time and effort into designing the perfect email, only to find it languishing in spam folders or lost in the abyss of undelivered messages. One way to increase your B2B email open rates is to improve deliverability. If you use B2B mailing lists, keep them clean and up-to-date. Regularly validating email addresses helps prevent your messages from ending up in spam, giving your emails a fighting chance to be seen.
With Mailmodo, SBNRI achieved 16% higher open rates by landing in their subscribers' inboxes. To enhance email deliverability, SBNRI partnered with Mailmodo's value-added services. Through domain warmup, list hygiene, and strategic template optimization, they achieved a remarkable 16.66% surge in open rates. SBNRI conquered email health challenges and harnessed AMP widgets' power to boost demo bookings. Read the full case study here.
Get 3X email conversions with interactive emails
Final takeaway
The B2B email open rate is around 15.14%, the click rate is 3.18%, and the click-through rate is 21%. To improve your B2B email open rates, you can personalize emails, create compelling content and optimize for mobile, improve deliverability, and ensure your audience finds the content useful enough to open your emails.
