We are regularly asked about Real Estate Email Marketing Open Rates. We have had agents call us upset about an open rate of 70% (it was too low). We have agents tell us that they are going to remove everyone from their list that didn’t open their email (even though this was their first send) and worse agents that want to cancel service because the average open rate was only 50%. All of these things point to a misunderstanding about email marketing open rates (and email marketing in general).
Email Marketing Open Rates
To help set expectations we thought it would be interesting to report on average email marketing open rates. So we researched a few of the other Email Service Providers out there and amazingly many of them aren’t very forthcoming with open rate data. We did manage to find that Mailchimp reports a 22.12% Open Rate for the Real Estate Industry and Constant Contact reports a 17.49% Open Rate. We find these are rates are fairly consistent with our own average open rates.
We do have a small segment of users from a particular agency that are achieving an average of close to 40%. We believe this is because of the value of the content that they provide and the cleanliness of their lists. In general our advice to agents is that if you are getting an open rate of around 20% you are doing pretty good.
A few things to remember about your open rate.
- 1. The same people are not opening your emails every time. Meaning that you have a small core of people that open every email but that most of the time there is a larger group of people who are opening an email every few times you send. So over a period of time you are actually interacting with a larger percentage of people than the average open rate indicates.
- 2. Open rates actually only indicate the minimum number of people that actually opened your email. Because of the way email opens are tracked, some opens just don’t get counted. This is because of preview panes and images automatically being turned off. So the reported open rate actually indicates the minimum number of people that we can track that opened your email.
- 3. Email marketing is a long term marketing effort, more of a marathon than a sprint. The goal is to regularly and consistently remind someone that you are an agent so that when they need one they think of you. The way to achieve this is to provide quality content that the reader feels is valuable and establishes you as the real estate authority in your area.
