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Comment by bravoyankee | Hacker News Reader

I've never gotten a 50% open rate (it's always been in the 10-15 range, and that's for people who voluntarily signed up) and I don't believe most people when they claim they get 50%+ consistently.

Funny thing is, most people do make that claim. They are the same people that say their penis is bigger than it actually is.

I think there's too many variables to say this is too small and that's too big (I'm talking about email open rates, stay with me here). Any information you get here probably isn't even worth considering.

Don't believe the hype.

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Here's a graph of open rates and click rates for a newsletter I send out 1-2 times a month:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/97lfk7clhj12flu/newsletter.png

According to Mailchimp, the list has an average open rate of 58% and an average click rate of 20%.

EDIT: hippo3 mentioned actively unsubscribing people who are not opening, in order to get a list with a high concentration of people who consistently open. As my newsletters contain no third party ads or promotions, I don't do such pruning.

I think there are a few reasons why our newsletters are well read:

- The content is very specific to our niche

- The target audience is members of our services

- Even though most readers are customers, they still have to opt-in to receive the newsletters

- I don't send newsletters out often, only 1-2 times a month

- The newsletters are sent out at pretty regular intervals, usually on Tuesday morning in the third week of the month

- The newsletters aren't very long, readers have to click through to read the entire articles

Great comment, Samuel_Michon. One thing that is interesting to me is that your newsletter requires ppl to click through to read the entire article (as does Peter's newsletters). This probably also helps with the accuracy of open rates. Even if a reader doesn't display images, Mailchimp (as well as other email service providers) will know if he/she opened the email via the click. So, it may be a more accurate count over an email that doesn't have any links in it... (just some speculation)

I don't believe most people when they claim they get 50%+ consistently.

I'm only one person, and not "most", and I don't want to share my latest data for commercial reasons but here's my open and click rates for all of my campaigns in September straight from the MailChimp's mouth: http://no.gd/openrates.jpg - these went out to a total of around 78k subscribers (software developers, specifically) each week.

Are most people lying though? I'm not so sure but the real proof of the pudding is in how much traffic they drive to you if you're in their newsletter somehow.

I can also vouch for that for Peter's list and all the other lists that are over the 50% mark in the graph on my blog post. Quite frankly, it IS HARD to get this high of an open rate. Peter and all the other publishers who are able to do it consistently are somewhat of an anomaly.

That said, another way I've seen this done is I know publishers who will actively unsubscribe people who are not opening. And, this will give you a much higher concentration of people who consistently open...

I know publishers who will actively unsubscribe people who are not opening.

Aha! Makes sense. Especially if these publishers offer email marketing as a service to other publishers.

I remember hearing that before long ago but it slipped my mind. Thanks.

This also has the side effect of making your email list have better deliverability. If you consistently have good open rates, Gmail and other email providers tend to mark your content as spam less often.

Mailchimp recommends [1] pruning out inactive or "low star" members semi-regularly for this reason.

[1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/segmenting-your-email-campaign-bas...

As a note, I have not done any of this yet. I think it's a good idea but I'm stuck in between the HN "growth!" and a personal "quality!" mindset.

Reaching 100k subscribers is my Everest so I hope I can start pruning slowly once it crosses that psychological threshold ;-)

Why is 50% unbelievable?

I have sent out newsletters for a non-profit for the last two years and their open rate is 40-60%. I assume its harder to "sell" corporate newsletters but 50% doesn't sound outrageous to me.

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