Should You Care About Your Email Open Rate?
Let’s get to the answer quickly. Yes, you should care about your email open rate. But the truth is, you need more context in evaluating whether your email program is a success.
Open rates are easy to track and report, making them one of the go-to metrics that managers and executives seek from their marketing/communications team. But without asking for more context and information, you could be wasting a lot time and money.
If your subscribers aren’t opening your emails, you’ve got a lot of work to do, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your organization’s mission and vision doesn’t include the lofty goal of achieving one of the world’s highest open rate. You have strategic goals, which a strong email program can help you achieve, but to do so, you have to start digging deeper than open rates.
Open Rates Can Be Easy to Manipulate
Susan, a fellow executive at a neighboring organization recently asked her newsletter owner for a 12-month report showing the open and unsubscribe rates for her organization’s newsletter. They provided the data, and Susan is pleased, but she challenged them to improve the open rate before the end of the year. Her team immediately got to work researching how to improve the rate. They started A/B testing subject lines, testing time of sends, and even start playing around with “who” the email came from (they found out open rates went up when the emails came from Susan instead of the organization’s name). They also discovered that they hadn’t been as diligent about keeping the organization’s email lists as clean as they could have.
Susan’s team found that one of the easiest ways to improve open rates was to suppress or remove subscribers who haven’t engaged with their emails in a while. For instance, an organization with a list of 100,000 subscribers, but 25,000 who haven’t opened an email in more than six months, will find it useful in trying to reengage those 25,000 subscribers one last time and then suppressing or removing those who failed to engage.
After the efforts in testing and list maintenance by Susan’s team, she was proud to report a sizeable increase in her organization’s open rate. She was even proud to report to her board of directors that the organization’s open rate was five times higher than her industry’s average!
Open Rates Don’t Report Taking Action
But here’s where Susan and other executives make a huge mistake. Open rates are great, but if your subscribers are opening an email and then taking no additional action, you’re probably missing a huge opportunity.
As a manager or executive, you don’t necessarily need to drill down into the data—you have more important things to do—but you do need to be able to push your team to improve its email performance on what matters to your organization’s bottom line. This could include subscriber actions such as: purchasing a product, attending an event, renewing a membership, reading online content, downloading a white paper, or leaving a review.
Here are 8 things your team needs to be paying attention to beyond open rates:
- Click-through rates (CTR)
- Click to open rate
- Spam score
- Mobile vs desktop open rate and click through rate (if you don’t have a mobile optimized site, and 50 percent of your opens are on mobile devices, you’re bound to frustrate those who click through to your site)
- Revenue per email and revenue per subscriber
- Unsubscribe rate
- Conversion rate (how many recipients completed the action you asked them to take)
- List growth rate
Summing it Up
Yes, open rates matter. An email isn’t worth it if it never gets opened.
No, you can’t stop there. As a leader, you have organizational goals, and a spectacular email open rate is just a start in building an effective communications or marketing plan.
Interested in improving your email performance beyond mere open rates. Let’s chat.
