How Useful Are Email Open Rates In 2012 & Beyond for Email Marketing?

Email open rates have traditionally been closely monitored and avidly debated by experts as one of the metrics that measure email marketing efficacy. But will email open rates still remain a relevant measure in 2012 and beyond?

Does It Pass The Relevancy Test?

In a bygone era of rather primitive email marketing, email open rates and clicks were the only measures that indicated how well you were doing. But as technology evolved, and other indices of email efficiency are gaining ground, we need to ask ourselves if email opens are really what we want to measure and analyze.

Let's say you send out email messages to your prospects and want to study how well you did. Even assuming that you get accurate measurements of open rates, what exactly does that tell you? Frankly, not much.

Merely knowing how many subscribers open your email is a poor proxy for the more meaningful information about how your readers respond to your email message and how they engage with you and your business as a result.

So by tracking numbers like clicks on links in your email, downloads of reports or ebooks you offer, orders for products or services you promote, registrations, response to surveys and similar data that reflect how well your marketing message engages your audience carry more weight.

But this doesn't mean email open rate has no value.

Ways To Use Email Open Rates

Once you understand how email open rates are measured and exactly what value their measurement conveys, you can analyze your data more intelligently - and derive useful conclusions.

First, think about trends rather than a single count taken in isolation. A 45% open rate doesn't tell you much - but when it has dropped from 65% last month, you know something is wrong. Either your email isn't making its way into your subscriber's inbox, or is not grabbing your reader's attention in the same way it once used to.

You can look critically at what you've done over this period that may result in the change. Did you change email services? If so, maybe they aren't as good at ensuring deliverability. Are you trying a different style of writing? Maybe that doesn't resonate with your audience. Have you changed the subject matter of your newsletter? If yes, your folks don't like it quite as much.

All these are valid conclusions based on the trend data - and can help you make meaningful changes that enhance your email marketing in the future.

Client Side Problems

When you analyze email open rate data in a more granular fashion, you might uncover problems that can be solved, and which could explode the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

For example, if you study your email open rates segmented by recipients with a gmail.com address and find that it is far below the average for the rest of your list, you know there's a problem with your service or content that's stopping messages from getting through to your Gmail users.

Knowing this, you can work on finding solutions and improving deliverability.

If Gmail users are a large share of your subscriber base, then this single change may totally revolutionize your results from email marketing!

Use Email Open Rates For Split Testing

If you're a passionate tester (and any information marketer using email should be), then you're surely split testing different headlines (or email SUBJECT lines) already.

By tracking email open rates for messages with different subject lines, you'll be able to find a 'winner'. If 50% of your list gets an email with subject line A and the other 50% gets subject line B, and the first has an open rate of 45% while the second only gets 15%, then you can be reasonably certain that the difference is accounted for by A being a more appealing headline.

Since all other elements of the email are identical, this is a very specific split test - and the results are quite reliable, provided your sample size reaches statistical significance.

Open Rates Indicate Reader Fatigue

It is no surprise that email open rates will drop as time passes by. Subscribers are most excited about being on your list soon after they sign up. But in the moving parade of life, their interests may shift, making your email less relevant to them, or becoming a lower priority.

Email open rates monitored over time are a good indicator of this shift.

Once you uncover this trend, you can attempt to reverse it by doing some eye-catching stuff, trying something unique and different from the norm, or even attempting a bolder or unconventional attitude to jolt your apathetic reader out of the rut of familiarity and boredom.

How Good Is Your Source?

Open rates can also indicate how targeted your list building efforts are. If you measure email open rates of subscribers added to your list from different sources, you may find that referrals from a particular marketing method or source of leads is significantly different in behavior from your other opt-ins.

This may permit you to more effectively deploy your advertising budget and marketing muscle to attract the highest impact readers onto your list.

It's true that email open rates are no longer very relevant or useful numbers to track and monitor. But there are specific ways to use this ubiquitous information that almost every email service provides you with. And when you understand email open rates, and know how they are measured and what they can indicate, your analysis will help make your email marketing more targeted, effective and ultimately profitable.

About the Author:

Dr. Mani is a heart surgeon, Internet infopreneur and social entrepreneur. This article is one of his 4-part series on email marketing.
You can read the others that explore email open rates in greater detail on his infopreneur blog.

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