Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of successfully delivered emails that are opened by recipients, calculated as unique opens divided by total emails delivered (excluding bounces).

In GTM operations, open rate is primarily a diagnostic metric for your email program’s health. It tells you two things: whether your subject lines are compelling enough to earn attention, and whether your sender reputation is strong enough to land in the inbox rather than spam.

Industry benchmarks for B2B email vary by type. Marketing newsletters typically see 20-30% open rates. Outbound cold emails from SDRs should aim for 40-60%. Transactional or triggered emails (welcome sequences, meeting confirmations) often hit 60-80%.

A few important caveats about open rate data. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, pre-loads email tracking pixels for Apple Mail users, inflating open rates. This means reported open rates are often 10-20% higher than actual opens. Don’t rely on open rate as your sole email performance metric — pair it with click-through rate and reply rate for a more complete picture.

Factors that influence open rate include: subject line quality (the biggest lever), sender name and address (familiar senders get opened more), send time (test different days and times for your audience), and list quality (engaged subscribers open more than stale contacts).

For example, if your outbound cold email open rate drops from 55% to 35%, check your deliverability first — you might be landing in spam. If deliverability is fine, test new subject lines. A/B test two subject lines with each batch and let data guide your decisions rather than guessing.

SDR operations tools track open rates alongside reply rates and meeting conversion rates to give you a full picture of sequence performance.