Reasonable, or acceptable, email opens vary widely by the nature of the email campaign. The 2 primary categories of email campaigns are retention and acquisition.  Within each of these, however, there are many different types of recipients and email messages.

Retention
Within retention, you can have promotional and transactional emails that are going to very different types of “house list” subscribers – from past  purchasers, to sweepstakes entries to active or lapsed.

Average Opens to be expected can range from 10-20% or more, depending on the message and type of recipient.

Acquisition
Within acquisition, you can have promotional or informational emails that are going to a broad range of qualities of prospects. Relevance, frequency and timing are most important when setting up an acquisition email campaign strategy and schedule.

Average Opens to be expected can range from 1-3% for one-off messages to cold leads.  5-7% can be worked towards if a formal, lead campaign is strategized and cold leads “warmed up!”

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A quick search online for “average email opens” or “average email response” will result in many different results based on various studies and averages by industry and category. I strongly urge that each marketer execute campaigns and test to create their own baseline %s of expected responses isolated to the advertiser, or even offer, level.  There are many factors in the % of response based on actions by recipients and, depending on your email system, only some of these are directly within your control.

For opens, marketers should consider and test the following:
– data (quality of recipients, relevance, geography, interests)
– sender reputation (IPs, email platforms or vendor partners)
– creative (From Name and Subject Line)

If clicks are being analyzed then one must also consider:
– creative (content, copy, image-to-text ratio, layout)
– calls-to-action (is there a strong reason for the recipient to want to click through to the site? have you included both hard – “buy now!” and soft calls-to-action – learn more, navigation bar)
– offer (is there an offer, or is this an informational email and all information is already in the ad?)