Email Metrics That Matter: Opens

Even with the advent of social media, digital marketers still can’t get away from the email, the most ubiquitous marketing channel. To build a strong marketing program, you have to be able to answer: how effective is my email program? In this multi-post series, we’ll be taking a look at which metrics are readily available and which should really be getting your attention.

Opens

Opens are by far the easiest metric to measure when it comes to emails. While a standard benchmark for e-commerce companies is an open rate around 20%, it’s difficult to say what your open rate should be since it can vary from one audience to another. If not viewed through the proper lens, open rates can a false indicator of an email program’s success.

Marketers love opens because they’re easy to measure. Your open rate gives you insight into how big your addressable audience is, but that’s about it. It’s basically like your sales organization reporting on how many calls it scheduled instead of how many deals it closed. In short, it distracts from the metric that matters most — revenue (In the email world, we measure Rev/M, which we’ll discuss in a later post).

Open rate is one of my least favorite metrics to measure the efficacy of a marketing program because it’s easy to manipulate. Here it is at it’s most basic level:

Opens/Sent

There are two ways I can make that ratio larger. I can get more opens — hurray! — this is what most people looking at the metric assume is happening. My other option is to drastically reduce the number of emails I send by cutting out my dormant email addresses — hurray, but less so — I still have the same addressable audience, but my ratio looks better.

The inverse of this is that my opens are actually going up — hurray again! — but I’m also acquiring more email addresses at a faster pace through other means, such as a sweepstakes. In this scenario, my open rate might actually be going down while the addressable audience is actually getting larger.

While open rates should always be interpreted through the right lens, it’s still true that having eyeballs on your creative is important. So how can you make sure that your email marketing program is doing everything it can to reach the largest addressable audience? There are two ways:

1) Increase Your Inboxing
Your sending domain’s reputation determines deliverability. Yes, Email Service Providers (ESPs) play their part, but as long as you’re using a reputable ESP, how your audience interacts with your email content is what matters most. There are two ways to make sure you’re on track: Get the right content to the right users at the right time and remove users who are no longer engaging with your content.

To do the former, consider who you’re targeting. Has your audience purchased before? Are you just getting to know each other? What types of items are they in the market for? By segmenting your audience and triggering messages based on your customer lifecycle, you can ensure that the messaging is relevant to where a customer is on his journey with your brand.

To do the latter, think about the ideal breakup. Should it be messy and never ending? Or a clean, congenial break that opens up other channels of communication. Make it easy for your subscribers to opt down to less frequent communications, opt into other channels, such as Instagram or Twitter, or simply opt out of email.

2) ABT: Test Your Subject Lines
Following our Always Be Testing mantra, make sure you regularly test out your subject lines. Assuming your messages hit the inbox, this is the best way to drive opens.

The key to the best open rates is surprise and delight. Sure, sunshine emojis might be cute in the first email, but sending them in every email might start to annoy your customers. By knowing who your customers are, you should be able to tailor your messaging so that it’s relevant and timely.

So, how should you compare subject lines?

Measure the short term impact. The quickest way to know whether a subject line is performing is simply to measure opens on subject line A vs. opens on subject line B. Make sure you wait for a large enough sample of results to come in to make an educated assessment.

Measure the long term impact. While opens are important in the short term, make sure you’re also measuring the impact of a subject line to a Customer’s Lifetime Value (CLV). After all, no metric’s an island. . .

TL;DR Open rates are important top-of-the-funnel metrics. You can focus on getting open rates in tip top shape by making sure you hit the inbox when your messages do go out, and deploying engaging subject lines to invite customers into interact with your brand. However, opens are only a small piece of the bigger picture (or delicious marketing pie).

*This post was written by Simon Data’s former Customer Success Manager, Ashley Gammie, who now resides in Brooklyn with her husband and two kids.