Aug 19 2008
Email Open Rates Don’t Matter
Ok, that’s a gross over-statement, but they don’t matter as much as they used to. This great article at HubSpot says much of what I’ve been professing for the past 8 months, but it explains it a hell of a lot better than I do. At a high level, here is why open rates don’t really matter:
- The open isn’t usually the desired action. The action is embedded in the email itself. You/we want the recipient to click and ultimately do the desired response
- The conservative nature of email programs, like Outlook, are blocking our images and thus not reporting email opens accurately.
- Mobile and handheld devices like the Blackberry are great for instantaneous delivery and action. However, an open on a Blackberry is not reported as an open.
- Most reported open rates don’t take into account bounces. If you send out 10,000 emails and 1,000 end up as hard bounces, you have a net delivery of 9,000. We should key off of 9,000 and not the 10,000.
- Spam filters have gotten so aggressive that many emails end up being seen as junk mail even though they aren’t. Most of those recipients will never open that email.
I’d really like to see us move away from opens as a metric and look at the following instead:
- Total Distribution - Fairly self explanatory.
- Net Delivery - this shows how accurate your list data is. If you end up with a lot of hard bounces you have some serious data accuracy challenges.
- Total Actions - whatever your desired action is, let’s report on it. If you want 10,000 completed surveys we should use that as the metric.
I think if we focused on the end result instead of the steps in between we could be smarter and ultimately more strategic about looking at results.
