How to Get the Most Out of Your Open Rate Data
Recently, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights reported on email marketing open rates across all sectors and all types of emails.
Without a doubt this is an excellent contribution to the email marketing community (#emailgeeks) at large – and beyond. However, like fire, it has the capacity for good and bad. So, I think a few caveats about open rates must be laid out on the table to make sure email marketers are working smart.
Are You an Email Marketing Gold Medalist?
1️⃣ Email marketing is like running. I.e., it’s an individual sport that you need to compare yourself to yourself – not to an Olympic gold medalist. 🥇
The upshot of this point is that looking over at the Smart Insights report is excellent to know what to expect, but if you’re yielding lower open rates, don’t despair. You just need to adjust your expectations. Without a doubt, the most important open rate stats are your month over month (MoM) and year over year (YoY) open rates. This is where you look at last month’s open rate versus the prior month and last month’s open rate versus the same month in the previous year, respectively.
This should give you a good indication if you are growing or sinking. If it is the latter, you need to revisit some email marketing ideas on how to get the best open rates.
And if your open rate is stellar, don’t close the article now, because the next point, might just pop your bubble.
Are You an Email Marketing Unicyclist?
2️⃣ Open rates can be easily manipulated by segmentation and targeting strategies. So don’t cut your list too much to inflate your open rates. Finding your equilibrium is critical! ⚖
When was the last time you spoke with someone about an email you sent them? Probably 20 minutes ago! And the conversation went something along the lines of, “Hey, did you get a chance to look into that email I sent you the other day?”
And hopefully, the response will be, “Of course, I did. I was just __________.”
That’s called a 100% open rate, 100% engagement rate. And if you send the email to your mother, you probably will get the same result every time regardless of your subject line is.
Now, in the world of email marketing, if you cut your list down to include only your top, most engaged contacts, you can also achieve stellar results. The key is to engage with the quality and quantity levers. This concept was developed by marketing research pioneer Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the founder of MECLABS. If you’ve never read any of his work, I strongly encourage that you do.
The premise of the quality and quantity levers is that you can severely hurt your campaigns by either tightening too much on the quality of your targeting (i.e., you’ll have a very small list and likely lose out on people who might engage with your email), or you can damage your sender reputation by opening the quantity to your entire list.
The key is finding balance and moderation, which is the key to every aspect of life, as the 12th-century philosopher/physician/theologian Maimonides professed. So, be sure to walk the fine line and get balance like a unicyclist to get the most out of your email marketing targeting.
And also be sure you are comparing apples to apples, active group campaigns to active group campaigns, lapsed to lapsed, etc.
Are You a Pragmatic Email Marketer?
3️⃣ Finally, marketers can easily get lost in the numbers, i.e., too many numbers. For example, I find the click-thru to open ratio (CTOR) a lot more effective than the overall click rate. And another metric I calculate is the effective engagement rate.
This is the formula for the engagement ratio: open rate multiplied by the CTOR. One of the reasons why I like this is that it gives a good overview of the entire email campaign (i.e., opens and clicks) in “one small bite-sized package”. This is particularly helpful when comparing campaigns with large variance in the send volume, e.g., an email sent to 2K or 200K contacts. In addition, I’ve seen high open rates that simply do not garner a lot of clicks. So it is imperative to optimize your subject lines accordingly because higher open rates do not necessarily equate to better engagement rates.
Now that you’ve made it this far, I hope you know what type of email marketer you are. Plus, use the abovementioned ideas and look at the Smart Insights article with your “smarketing” glasses. Go on and learn about email marketing open rates across all sectors.
