How to Increase Email Open Rates (It's Usually Not Your Subject Lines)

To increase email open rates, fix three things in this order: what you send, so subscribers expect something worth opening; who you send it to, so only engaged subscribers get your campaigns; and how your setup and design look to inbox providers like Gmail. Subject lines and preview text come last. On engaged segments in Klaviyo, we aim for an open rate of 50% or higher.

Most ecommerce brands trying to fix their open rates are working on the wrong problem.

They test subject lines. Add emojis. Try different send times. The needle barely moves.

Or they decide it's a deliverability issue and only send to a tiny segment, which caps their revenue.

Both of those things matter. Neither is usually the root cause.

The root cause is that the brand has trained its audience to ignore it.

Here's what that means, and the order we fix it in when we take on a new client.

By Emiel Dingemans, Founder of Magicianly

Updated October 2026

What Is a Good Email Open Rate in 2026?

On a properly engaged segment, aim for 45% as your minimum and 50% or higher as your target. If you're consistently hitting 60%, you're in a really strong position.

Those numbers are for campaigns sent to engaged segments, as Klaviyo reports them. Not your overall account average.

If your overall open rate in Klaviyo looks low, it's almost always dragged down by unengaged contacts sitting in your account. That's not your real number. Your real number is your open rate on engaged segments only.

One caveat. Apple Mail Privacy Protection can register an open when nobody read the email, so opens are a rough signal. Use open rate to find the problem, and judge the results on clicks and orders. Here's more on whether your Klaviyo open rates are real. If you want to see the vendor averages, we've collected them in our ecommerce email marketing benchmarks.

Why Are Your Email Open Rates Low?

Usually because three things are working against you at the same time:

1. 1Your content has trained subscribers to expect very little.
2. 2You're sending to people who stopped engaging, which hurts where your emails land for everyone.
3. 3Your setup and design make it easy for Gmail to treat your emails as promotional noise.

Fix one of them and you'll see some improvement. Fix all three and your open rates move meaningfully.

Is It the Spam Folder or the Promotions Tab?

Often it's the promotions tab. And that hurts even when you're nowhere near spam.

Gmail has gotten much more aggressive about filtering brand emails into promotions. Your email technically lands in the inbox, but far fewer people see it. People check the promotions tab much less than the primary inbox, so your opens, clicks and revenue drop with it.

So the goal isn't just staying out of spam. It's landing in the primary inbox as often as you can, by making your emails feel less like marketing and more like something one real person sent to another.

That doesn't mean tricks. Fake "Re:" subject lines and misleading sender names can make things worse. Here's what Gmail's newer AI features change, in our guide to Gmail's AI Inbox.

A simple test before you write any email: would a friend send this subject line to another friend? If the answer is no, Gmail will probably see it as promotional too.

How Does Your Content Train Subscribers to Ignore You?

Every time you send an email, your subscriber makes a split-second decision about whether to open it. That decision is based mostly on their past experience with your emails.

If the last 10 emails they got from you were all discount blasts and product promotions, they've learned your emails are only worth opening when they're in the mood to buy. Every other email gets ignored by default.

That's the training problem.

Open rate isn't just a deliverability metric. It's a content metric.

It's also why some brands fix their technical setup, clean their list, do everything right on deliverability, and still have mediocre open rates. Their subscribers simply expect very little from them.

What Should You Send Instead?

More variety. Promotions are only one of the seven content categories we plan campaigns from. The others cover things like product highlights, social proof, education, brand stories and holiday or occasion emails.

When subscribers can't predict what's coming next, they open more.

If every email is a discount, there's no curiosity. If one email is a myth-buster, the next a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, then a founder story, then a customer review, people open because they genuinely don't know what's inside.

Here's how we plan that in our email campaign strategy beyond discounts.

Who Should You Send Your Campaigns To?

Your engaged subscribers. Not your whole list.

Inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook track engagement signals: opens, clicks, replies and spam complaints. When you send to your full list and a large part of it doesn't engage, they use that signal to decide where your emails land. Not just for the unengaged people, but for everyone, including your best customers.

So by sending every campaign to your whole list, you're teaching inbox providers to deprioritize you.

Gmail's AI also summarizes and groups emails now. If your engagement is weak, your emails are more likely to be treated as noise. The only way to fight that is strong engagement, and the only way to get strong engagement is to send to people who actually want to hear from you.

How Do You Rebuild Open Rates With Engaged Segments?

Start small, then expand as long as your open rates hold. This is the framework we use in Klaviyo:

1. 1Build four engaged segments: 14, 30, 60 and 90 days. Each one includes anyone who opened or clicked an email, was active on your site, or placed an order within that window.
2. 2If your open rates are below 30%, start with your 14-day segment only. Send three campaigns a week for two weeks.
3. 3Check your open rates after those six sends. If you're at 50% or higher, expand to your 30-day segment.
4. 4Keep expanding gradually. Every two weeks, look at the previous results and decide whether to move up a segment.
5. 5Make your 90-day segment your default. That's your bread and butter for campaigns.

This works because you're retraining inbox providers to see your emails as wanted. When a high share of recipients open and click, Gmail rewards you with better inbox placement.

Two Klaviyo details worth knowing. Klaviyo's own suggested starting point for an engaged segment also includes people who subscribed in the last 15 days, so new subscribers get your campaigns before they've had a chance to engage. And if a lot of your list uses Apple Mail, you can exclude Apple Privacy Opens from the Opened Email condition, so automatic opens don't keep people in your engaged segments (Klaviyo Help Center, Klaviyo Help Center).

Who Should You Suppress Before You Start?

The people who are clearly never going to engage again. A lot of brands pay for a huge Klaviyo list and get their revenue from a small part of it.

We suppress:

• anyone who hasn't opened, clicked or been active on your site in the last 180 days, and received at least 5 to 10 emails from you in that period;
• anyone added to your list at least a year ago who has never received a single email from you;
• anyone who has ever marked your email as spam;
• hard bounces, meaning the address doesn't exist or permanently rejected your email;
• soft bounces that happened four times or more.

Spam complaints deserve extra attention, because they're one of the heaviest signals inbox providers use against your sender reputation. Google asks bulk senders to keep their spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and never let it reach 0.30%.

Yes, this can be scary. Your list might go from 50,000 to 20,000 subscribers. But a smaller list that engages will always outperform a big, bloated list that doesn't. And your Klaviyo bill goes down too.

For the full process, including how to treat past customers and when to try re-engagement first, see our guide to email list cleaning.

Which Technical Settings Affect Open Rates?

They won't fix low open rates on their own. But if they're wrong, everything else you do works less well. Three things need to be in place:

1. 1A branded sending domain. This is non-negotiable now. Without one, you send from shared infrastructure and share a sender reputation with lots of other brands. Klaviyo requires a branded sending domain to meet Gmail and Yahoo's bulk-sender authentication requirements, and it removes the "via klaviyomail.com" line next to your sender name. Here's how to set up a branded sending domain in Klaviyo.
2. 2A from address on that domain. If your domain is yourbrand.com, send from something like hello@yourbrand.com or founder@yourbrand.com.
3. 3A DMARC record. It tells inbox providers your emails are legitimate and haven't been tampered with. If your domain doesn't have one yet, Klaviyo offers to add a basic DMARC record during branded sending domain setup.

The rest of the setup is in our email deliverability checklist.

How Do You Make Your Emails Readable for Gmail's AI?

Give it live text to read. Gmail's AI, Gemini, now reads and interprets emails. If your email is mostly images with very little live text, it has very little to work with. And an email it can't understand is easier to deprioritize.

The changes we make:

• Write proper alt text for every image. Describe what the image actually shows.
• Use Klaviyo's product blocks instead of product sections designed as images. Live product blocks can be read. Images can't.
• Put your top bar offer in live text. A "free shipping over $75" banner should be text, not a graphic.
• Add live text to your footer. Product category links, support information and loyalty program details all give Gmail something to read.
• Send a plain-text email one to three times a month. It reads like a real one-to-one email and often stands out in a crowded inbox. Here's why plain-text emails can win.

What About Subject Lines?

They're the finishing layer, not the fix. If your subject line sounds like marketing, Gmail will treat it like marketing.

Write conversational subject lines that look like they came from a real person:

• lowercase is fine;
• no excessive punctuation;
• no shouting about sales and discounts.

Then A/B test angles that are actually different, not tiny variations. Curiosity vs direct. A question vs a statement. Short vs long. First name vs no personalization. Let each test collect enough data, record what wins, and over time you'll learn what your audience responds to. Check clicks and orders on the winner too, not just opens. Here's how we run an email A/B test.

And don't forget the preview text. It's essentially a second subject line. Most brands leave it as the default first line of the email, which is often something like "View this email in your browser." Write it on purpose, so it gives people a second reason to open.

More in our email subject line best practices.

How Do You Keep Open Rates High Once They're Fixed?

Keep growing your list. Even at 55% or 60%, every email list shrinks over time. People unsubscribe, disengage and move on.

If you're not consistently bringing in good new subscribers, your results will slowly decline, no matter how well everything else works. Here's how we approach building a Shopify email list.

So How Do You Increase Email Open Rates?

• Measure open rate on engaged segments, not your account average. Aim for 50% or higher.
• Send a real mix of campaigns, not just promotions, so subscribers stop ignoring you.
• Send campaigns to engaged segments only. If you're below 30%, start with your 14-day segment and expand as open rates hold.
• Suppress contacts who stopped engaging, spam complainers and bounces.
• Set up a branded sending domain, a from address on your own domain and DMARC.
• Use live text, alt text and regular plain-text emails, so Gmail's AI can read you.
• Fix subject lines and preview text last.

Your subject line earns one open. What you sent last time decides whether they open the next one.