You are using your email open rates the wrong way. That’s right, I said it – you are doing it wrong.
Most small businesses use the email open rate as their only metric to gauge the success (or failure) of their email campaign. Five years ago, that would have been okay, but these days it doesn’t quite work that way. Here are three reasons why you shouldn’t be using open rates the way you are – and what you can do to use open rates correctly as a tool to improve your campaign results.
Email Open Rates Are Decreasing
As concerns for privacy grow, email open rates are getting less and less accurate. To understand why, we need to know how open rate tracking works. In the simplest terms, email open rates are tracked by inserting a unique, 1×1 pixel image into the body of an email. When the image is downloaded, the email is reported as being opened. If an email isn’t opened, the image isn’t downloaded and the email isn’t reported as opened. Herein lies the problem.
First, most email applications will block images by default (until the recipient clicks the “Show all images from …” button). If the email is opened but the images are blocked, the tracking image was blocked too. This means that the “Open” wasn’t reported back.
Second, if an email recipient is using a desktop email client (and even some of the online email clients) that has an email preview pane, the email may have reported as opened – even if it didn’t get read. This happens when the recipient is going through their inbox pressing the “Next Email” button without reading the contents. Technically, the email was opened for that split second, the tracking image was downloaded (if images were enabled) and the open was recorded.
Third, if an email recipient is checking their email on a mobile device, they probably aren’t looking at the HTML version of the email – they’re looking at the text version. This means that the tracking image won’t be downloaded (because it’s not there in the text version) and the open won’t be recorded.
The Wrong (and Right) Ways to Use Email Open Rates
The combination of these three issues can understate your open rates by as much as 35%. This doesn’t mean that open rates can’t be used as a valuable metric for your business, though. Let’s look at some of the wrong ways people use email open rates (and the right way to use them, too).
Apples to Oranges
Why it’s wrong: Open rates vary dramatically when sending targeted emails to prospects or to customers (which you all should be doing). Typically your customer emails will have a higher open rate than prospect emails. If you’re comparing the two – you may trick yourself into thinking your email was more successful (or less successful) than it really was. When you get a bigger list, other factors come into consideration as well. Things like what day of the week and what time of day the emails were sent can have considerable impact on your open rates.
The right way: When comparing open rates, make sure you are comparing apples to apples. Make sure you’re looking at two emails sent to the same customer versus prospect, subject lines, day of week, time of day, etc. Keep as many things the same as you can. Then you can perform an analysis based on the differences.
The Only Metric
Why it’s wrong: When only using open rates to gauge the success of your email, you’re missing out on the most important thing – response. Every email you send should have some sort of call-to-action in it. Without one, there’s no point in sending the email. Who cares if someone opened your email if they didn’t do what you were ultimately trying to get them to do? That doesn’t mean you need to stop trying to get them to do it, but don’t just assume that the email was a bomb or bust just based on the number of opens.
The right way: The real success of your campaign should come from your ability to effectively persuade the audience to act. Click-through rates, sales conversion tracking, opt-in tracking are all better (and infinitely more accurate) ways to gauge the success of your email. Make sure that every email has a call-to-action, and that you can track the links being clicked. Infusionsoft users can use Automation Links to trigger automation based on those link clicks.
Testing, Testing and More Testing
Why it’s wrong: When you focus on the top level metric of opens, you ignore the most important component of your email in regards to open rates – the subject line. Persuasive email subjects get your emails opened. Most small business marketers don’t realize this. They look at the open rate and say “it worked” or “it didn’t work”. They don’t look deeper to see what else they can learn.
The right way: For example – if two emails have different subject lines and were sent on the same day – the first has a 15% open rate, the second has a 32% open rate. We can infer that the second email had a better subject line for that audience. Another example: let’s compare two prospect emails with the same subject line. The first was sent on Monday, the second on a Thursday. The Monday email had a 26% open rate and the Thursday had a 15% open rate. From the data, you could infer that your prospects are more likely to open emails on Mondays than Thursdays.
Then What?
Once you’re using your open rates effectively, there are some really cool things you can start to learn about your list. You’ll start to see themes for your subject lines that work better than others. You’ll see some days of the week that have better response than other days. You can see which calls to action work best for customers vs prospects. As you discover these valuable insights, make sure you keep a record of them. A simple Excel file (or Google Doc) of lessons learned will help you not only keep track of the lessons learned, but it will become a source to turn to when you’re stuck for your next email broadcast.
Tell us how you are using open rates and the what your tests are showing you about your customers and prospects.
[Image credit: Justin Marty]
This post Uncovering The Open Rate Myth was first published on the Big Ideas Blog.