Opening rate stat and newsletter campaigns
Written by Administrator
Despite the rise of social media, email marketing is still key to many websites’ relational and sales strategies. As with anything to do with digital marketing, there are numerous metrics and acronyms associated with email marketing, but some of which have too much weight placed on them at the expense of others.
A great example of this is the importance people place on open rate,
often at the expense of click through rate and conversions. In fact, I
would argue conversion rate and ROI is typically overlooked when
analysing a newsletter’s effectiveness. If you send out regular
promotional emails and/ or newsletters to your subscriber list and you
are focusing on how to improve your open rate, you are chasing the wrong
data.
View it as a process
It is important not to look at these stats as being independent of each
other and focusing on one specific metric. You could improve open rate
by using cryptic subject lines, but that wouldn’t improve your click
through rate, in fact it would probably increase your unsubscribes. On
the flip side, you could increase click through rate and conversions by
offering an incredible deal, but if not enough people open the email to
make the deal worthwhile, it is irrelevant.
Quality over quantity
In an ideal world we would see 100% of people open their email and
convert 100% of the time, but that simply won’t happen. I would argue it
is better to have fewer people open your email and act on it, than have
a higher open rate but no one performs any action.
To illustrate this, if we look at the example below (which presumes a product value of £20), focusing on the open rate figure would suggest that newsletter B is the more effective of the two. However, if we look at the click through rate and ROI as well, we can see that despite sending us less traffic, newsletter A is worth more to us.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| Emails sent | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| Emails opened | 1,500 | 3,000 |
| Open rate | 15% | 30% |
| Click through rate | 30% | 10% |
| Clicks | 450 | 300 |
| Conversion rate | 10% | 10% |
| Sales | 45 | 30 |
| ROI | £900 | £600 |
.
Improving your email marketing
We won’t cover ground that has been done many times before by people who
know much more than me about this subject. Instead, I’ll point you in
their direction:
• Email marketing field guide: http://resources.mailchimp.com/email-marketing-field-guide
• Email design guidelines: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/
• General email marketing strategy guide: http://www.davechaffey.com/guides/email-marketing-strategy-guide
• Round up of useful email marketing blog posts on SitePoint: http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/09/16/the-ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing/
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