Understanding Open Rates
Email open rates have long been considered a crucial metric for measuring the success of email marketing campaigns, providing a glimpse into how engaged your audience is with the content you’re delivering. So, you’ve probably been relying heavily on this metric for a long time and may be asking yourself:
Are email open rates reliable?
Are email open rates accurate?
Am I receiving false email open rates?
Over time, the landscape of email marketing has evolved, and open rates have become an increasingly unreliable metric, prone to numerous external factors that can skew data and present a misleading picture of your campaign’s performance. In this blog, we’ll delve into the reasons why open rates are no longer a dependable measurement of engagement and how shifting your focus to alternative metrics, such as click-through rates (ctr) and embedded surveys, can offer a more comprehensive and actionable understanding of your audience’s level of involvement with your email content.
What Affects Open Rates?
One of the primary factors that can impact open rates is the prevalence of email clients and devices that automatically load images, which are often used to track whether an email has been opened. From hidden pixels in email content to automatic image downloads, modern email clients have become adept at detecting and registering email opens, even in cases where the recipient may not have actively engaged with the message. Furthermore, the increasing use of mobile devices and the prevalence of email applications that prefetch content can also contribute to distorted open rate numbers, further diminishing the metric’s reliability as an accurate reflection of user engagement.
If you are a business-to-business company, you may have declining email open rates. This is due to the average business user wading through on average 120 emails per day (that’s 600 emails a week, 2,400 emails a month, and over 28,000 a year). Due to the sheer number of emails, many users will have email rules to sort incoming mail which sometimes sit unopened for days or weeks depending on how busy your customer may be.
Whether you are receiving inflated numbers or declining numbers, email open rates are becoming unreliable. As a result, marketers are increasingly turning to alternative metrics that provide a more nuanced understanding of audience behavior and interaction with email content.
Tools You Need for Success with Tracking Open Rates
One of the key considerations when relying on open rates as a metric is the need for precise tracking and analysis. Marketers must be cognizant of the various tools and techniques employed by email clients to detect and record email opens, and they must be willing to adjust their strategies accordingly. Sometimes, as marketers, we start with a few simple tests over a few months to see if that changes our open rate metrics such as:
- Segmenting your audience – sometimes this needs an update every so often.
- Write subject lines in a new way to be more compelling.
- Deliver more valuable content.
- Find the best time to send emails.
When these strategies don’t start to show us anything different. It’s time to adjust your metric viewing strategy instead. This may involve the use of surveys, click-tracking, and other engagement-focused metrics that provide a more holistic view of how recipients are interacting with your email content. By focusing on these alternative metrics, marketers can gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s interests, preferences, and level of engagement – ultimately leading to more effective and targeted email marketing campaigns.
Clicks: A More Reliable Approach
As open rates become less reliable, marketers are turning to other metrics that offer a more accurate representation of audience engagement. Clicks and embedded surveys, for example, provide a direct indication of how recipients are interacting with the content and the actions they are taking because of receiving your email.
Click-through rate (CTR) is probably a metric you’ve heard before. It measures how often people click on an ad, link, or call-to-action (CTA) compared to the number of people who see it or in this case, open it.
To calculate CTR, divide the number of clicks by the total number of emails delivered (not opened) and multiply by 100:
CTR = (Number of clicks ÷ Total number of emails delivered) x 100
Now that you have the number, how do you know if you have a good CTR?
CTR varies by industry as open rate does but generally CTR ratings are categorized as follows:
- 0% - 2%: Low CTR (but 1% is common in retail)
- 2% - 4%: Moderate, acceptable range
- 4% - 6%: High CTR, indicates good performance
- 6% and above: Excellent CTR, very effective strategy
By monitoring the CTR, you will be able to tell brand interest, email fatigue, email content (written and visual), link placement, link count, and media type, and which is working to get you the most engagement from your email campaigns.
While CTR is the most reliable approach to understanding your engagement, there are plenty of other metrics to consider looking at including:
- Bounce Rate: the percentage of recipients who didn’t receive your email.
- Unsubscribe Rate: A high unsubscribe rate could mean your emails are no longer relevant or meeting your audience’s expectations.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of emails that result in a goal being achieved.
- List Growth Rate: A measure of how well your email acquisition efforts are working.
- Overall ROI: Return-On-Investment (ROI) measures the total revenue generated from your email campaigns against the cost of running them.
- Subscriber/Customer Lifetime Value: the total worth to a business of a customer over the whole period of their relationship with the brand.
By monitoring a variety of metrics, marketers can gain valuable insights into the content and messaging that resonates most with their audience, allowing them to refine and optimize their campaigns for greater success.
Conclusion: Embracing the Evolution of Email Metrics
While open rates have long been a staple of email marketing, the evolving landscape of email technology and user behavior has rendered this metric increasingly unreliable and less indicative of true audience engagement. Marketers who embrace the shift towards alternative metrics, such as clicks, will be better equipped to navigate the nuances of modern email marketing and gain a more accurate understanding of their audience’s interests and preferences. By adapting their strategies to these changing trends, marketers can unlock new opportunities for success and deliver more impactful, targeted, and effective email campaigns.
