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Do you use open rates in your email marketing campaigns?
I am just starting to put together an email marketing campaign for my business and I was just wondering how popular open rates are? How much do you depend on open rates for your email marketing metrics?
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4 Answers
Yes, Open rates are indicative of a successful campaign. But its not the most important metric since its prone to error. Some email clients (Outlook, Livemail, Thunderbird) and web-mail services (including Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail) can block images from being rendered. This yields lower open rates than actual views.
Keep the following in mind when you do your campaigns:
* Freshness of email list: First time readers have lower open rates because (1) you haven't developed rapport yet, or (2) your aren't on their white list - so as to allow the client in showing embedded images.
* Vertical Focused: IT/Geek lists tend to have lower open rates because either they don't read your emails (especially if its unsolicited) or because they are over zealous with their security settings (preventing you from tracking open rates.)
* Geography of list: I do a lot of email advertising in Scandinavia, and I noticed difference in open rates in the region (Finland +60%, followed by Norway, Denmark and Sweden 20%.)
* Bad Subject lines: Even if your spam checker approves your content, poorly written subjects are a sure thing for low open rates.
But at the end of the day, tie open rates with Click-thrus. Both these metrics together give good insight on how your campaign preformed. Other things to monitor: time of day when campaign was sent, viewed and clicked, list-bounce-rate and graphic intense mailings vs. plain-jane formats.
To add:
- WELCOME campaigns always have the highest Open Rate.
- To Zaki's point, Open Rate with Click Rate is a good measure of the creative's effectiveness at generating interest (although, many argue against the click:open ratio).
- OPEN RATES are best used when performing Subject Line Testing. For EVERY campaign, you should perform some type of SL testing!
Finally, while many email clients turn off images by default (as a response to Spammers), the open rates we see today are more accurate in comparison to open rates from 5+ years ago, as loading/opening images by default artificially increased the counts. As well, many email clients now consider clicks, without image loads, to be an open as well.
Good Luck!
Hey Sara: Just wanted to put my 2 cents in here to re-emphasize what was said above. A great subject line is critical to getting someone to open your email. Spend at least as much time coming up with a compelling subject line as you do on your email copy.
If you can't get someone to open your email naturally your message is lost. There are plenty of resources available online about copywriting, and writing compelling headlines. Joe Vitale @ http://MrFire.com is a great place to start. Get on Clayton Makepeace's email list and you'll get a tip-a-day. Also, get on John Carlton's list for tips as well.
Cheers,
David
Hi Sara, I agree with the other responses. We use Vertical Response for email distribution and they provide very insightful reports comparing open rates and click through rates on each of the links in the email. This is a nice way to see if your conversions (or sales) closely match the click through rates. If not more work needs to be done to bring them in line.
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