Email open Rates should not be considered the ultimate metric to track for your Email Campaigns.
Now, before the Email Marketing fanatics among you come around with pitchforks citing blasphemy, hear us out.
We’re not dismissing open rates entirely but emphasizing the importance of other metrics aligned with your business objectives.
Marketer needs to look at improving other metrics like click-through rates (CTR). Design enticing offers or creative campaigns to attract customers to visit your website and purchase products. Now, this can be done via automation programs as well as segmented targeting.
This post explains why email open rates shouldn’t be the sole metric for gauging your email program’s success.
We’ll analyze high and low CTOR (click-through open rates) campaigns, explaining their impact on ROI and why increasing them benefits your email investments.
Top 5 reasons why email open rates don’t matter anymore
Privacy updates like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection are making email open rates an increasingly unreliable metric by masking user activity. The evolving landscape prioritizes interaction quality over quantity, rendering open rates less critical for measuring success.
Here are 5 reasons why they don’t matter as much now:
1. Not an Accurate Presentation of Campaign Performance
If you are a significant ecommerce brand and you targeted your most active email openers and clickers for last month for your latest Sale campaign.
The open rates are around 25% and more, but the click and click-to-opens ratio is less than 1%.
Does that mean your campaign has performed well? Of course, in terms of engagement jargon and maintaining your domain hygiene for ISPs, it has performed brilliantly.
But what is the number of online orders that you have received from this campaign? Probably on the lower end due to the low number of clicks on it. So now, asking the same question, was this campaign really successful?
No, it was an average day for your ROI. Highly targeted campaigns to your active base yield email open rates higher than usual.
Still, the other metrics also need to be analyzed to provide clarity on the performance of the campaign.
The intent of the Email campaign is that your customers should transact with your brand or at least check out your products and build a brand affinity with them. So balance your analysis based on not only open rates but also on clicks for your ROI/Conversions.
2. Define your success metrics
Seriously, write this down.
What are you expecting from your email campaigns that will contribute to your brand in a positive way?
In short, what are the numbers you are looking for to call it a win?
In some cases, the number of opens is looked at as secondary details by deliverability engineers. Different brands have different success measures. Some focus on gaining subscribers or generating new leads from their email marketing campaigns.
Some brands might need to increase subscribers as a KPI, and others less so. Thus success in your business objectives will vary according to the industry. Therefore, marketers have to decide what matters to them in terms of the larger picture.
3. There are other Metrics for Analysing Campaign Performance
Namely, clicks and CTOR to start with. These should provide you with more information on your audience’s behavior and help you plan better campaigns for them.
The bounce and unsubscribes are equally important, which tell us the number of ids that got soft or hard bounced and which are invalid. The unsubscribe rate, if high, needs to be looked at for reasons by a Marketer to understand why users are unsubscribing to mailing lists.
Thus it would be short-sighted for anyone to compare campaign performances.
Other important metrics to measure include spam complaints, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and list growth rate.
4. The Conversions vs Opens Pandemonium:
All brands are looking to increase their conversion rate. In such cases, opens are secondary to clicks and the number of sessions the website gets for their transactions.
In such scenarios, marketers will be looking at getting the most clicks from their users and getting them interested via campaign content to entice a transaction.
We have had brands come into us exasperated about not getting enough orders despite their “Open Rates” being sky-high. Here the trick is to improve on the metrics that will eventually get them to their goals and achieve business targets.
5. Segmented emails to segmented audience hampers email open rates
According to Dela Quist an Email Influencer,” sending batch and blast Emails to a major chunk of your lists will engage more users.”
It is true that if you are sending a campaign to a segmented base of users, open rates would naturally be higher than if you are doing a batch and blast to your entire database. However, you will still create a greater number of unique openers.
For Example:
Trigger – Send Total 1000, Open Rate 40% = Total Opens 400
Batch & Blast – Send Total 100,000, Open Rate 12% = Total Opens 1,200
So in this atypical case, open rate is not the best metric if your business objective is getting more of your users engaged and expanding on the reach.
Thus, open rate cannot be the only KPI you should be monitoring for determining the success or failure of your campaigns.
Comparison of Campaigns with CTORs
So we looked at a few campaigns that we have sent for the brands we cater to, and we can see the difference in their metrics, but what do they tell us about their success?
The above campaign has an open rate of 15% plus and an equally good CTOR rate of 10% to match. That means 10% of the 16k users who opened the mail clicked on it, and that created 1800 web sessions for the client. Out of those sessions, if even 10% of the users transacted, that’s still 180 orders in a day!
In this instance, the campaign has generated a good open rate but very low clicks and hence will not generate the web traffic the brand intends from the audience.
In this case, the antidote will be to have a better offer for the campaign, and some good design work needs to be done on the HTML to make it more attractive and engaging to the subscribers. But as such, this campaign was a bit of a dud!
We now clearly see that if we adjust our mindsets to look at other metrics for engagement we quickly see a change in the business goals.
Now, on the other hand, there are some brands within the BFSI industry that have an objective just to keep their audience engaged via weekly/monthly newsletters, and here, the opens will be a fair metric to measure your campaign success.
Parting Thoughts
With the reasons stated above, it’s high time to consider email open rates as the sole email marketing success metric. This is essential for a brand that depends on conversions, orders, or the growth of your customer base.
A slight increase in reaching out to the rest of the users via Batch and Blast will add a significant amount to your ROI as well, as that means you are reaching out to a wider audience.
If you’re looking for an email service provider that promises not only successful email deliverability but also accurate metrics to measure, book a demo with Netcore and witness how your email marketing campaigns can be a success.
