Ok, you built a strong list of subscribers and you have begun to send your emails... Now what? Are your campaigns successful? Are your subscribers interested in your emails? What do you do with all this data from your email sends? How does it help you improve your campaigns?
Close to the end of April I created a poll on twtpoll asking what area of email marketing is the most difficult to find information about. It was not a big surprise to me, or to @jacaldwell (another fellow email marketing guru that RT'ed my post) that the clear winner was information about how to analyze your data. A close second was strategies for testing, which I have written about as one of the first posts I wrote for this blog.
I believe there are some basics that need to be understood as a good foundation for all to build from when it comes to analyzing the data you obtain through email marketing. Understanding and acting on the data to improve your results is one of the major keys to long term success with email marketing. For the next few weeks, I will be posting my thoughts on the basic data points and what to look for in each area when you are analyzing your results. First up...
Understanding Open Rates
Open rates are not used to understand just the effectiveness of your subject line, they can help you to discover many things about your email's overall effectiveness. Once you have gotten a subscriber to opt-in to your emails, the next hurdle is getting them to open the emails. Before you can act on the open rate to improve your emails, you need to know what exactly is the open rate and how is it determined.
The open rate is defined as the number of times a specific email has been opened or viewed by the subscriber. The stat is found by adding the number of times the images from the specific email have been downloaded by the a specific subscriber id that is unique to each subscriber. Every time an HTML email is opened, your email browser with "call' for those images and provide the server with the information needed to record an "opened email."
Here is where things start to get confusing...
The open is nowhere near a perfect number. Emails can be opened by the same person several times. Emails can be forwarded and opened by friends which will "look" just like the original subscriber. Emails can be read completely and deleted without ever being noted as opened since the subscriber decided not to download the pictures. Images might automatically get downloaded when the subscriber views the email in the preview panel in an email browser. When is comes to open rates, the waters can quickly become muddy.
Unique vs. Total Opens
The unique open rate is the number of subscribers that opened your email. The total open rate is the number of times your email was opened regardless of subscriber. For example, If I opened an email 5 times over 2 days time it would record 1 unique open and 5 total opens. Simple enough... right?
The difference between these two numbers for each email you send is important to understand. There is a trend among email marketers to start looking only at the unique open rate, believing that the total open rate is too clouded with junk and uncertainty that it will not bring value to review. However, there is a lot that can be found by looking at the total open rate numbers.
It is true that if one subscriber's data shows the email was opened by this person 10 times it could just be that the person opened the email 10 times. But what if that person is actually forwarding that email to 9 friends? Wouldn't you want to know that? What if that happens with that subscriber often? Is that subscriber an advocate for your company? Would you want to message to that subscriber differently? Well of course you would! Dig into the data and find the trends. What if one subscribers total opens were 50 or more for one email? What was it about that email that caught the subscribers interest? You can learn a lot from this number.
It not a bad thing that your campaign became viral...
One of the best things to happen to an email campaign is for it to go viral or spread quickly to friends not currently on your list. Knowing the difference between the total and unique opens is one way to know that your message is hitting home and beginning to spread. The larger the difference the larger the potential that your email was forwarded and read by more then just your subscribers.
Quick question... When your email is forwarded to a friend, does the friend have a way to subscribe within the email if they like the email and want to receive more emails in the future? If not, you are missing out... Capture the new subscribers when they are interested!
What is a Good Open Rate?
That is all you really wanted to know from this post, right? Is your open rate good or is it horrible? That is an all too common question without a good answer. I can spend time telling you the average open rate based on your industry, but yours could be completely different. Open rates are going to fluctuate and will be different for everyone. You should be looking to improve your open rates overall, but more importantly it is the fluctuations that your attention should be on. I believe the open rate is not something that you will base the success or failure of your campaign. While getting your email opened by your subscribers is the first challenge, it does not do you any good if your subscribers don't take any action. To that end, next up will be understanding clicks...
Dan, nice post. Once thing I often say to my clients is "look at your open rates last", they're unreliable and ultimately can lead to a jaded picture of what's going on.
ReplyDeleteOpens can only be logged (by any Email Marketing Service) when a reader download the images of the email. A small 1x1 image is then loaded in which subsequently logs an Open. Some may say that "well someone clicked on my email, so they opened it, right?" which is another misconception. The EEC (Email Experience Council) recently released information to ESPs and Email Marketers alike that Opens should really be renamed to "Render Rate" in order to convey the mechanism I explained earlier. This should sort out some ESPs/Email Marketers regarding opens as anyone who downloaded images and those that believe it's anyone that opened image OR clicked.
As a rule of thumb, if you REALLY want to know average open rates, consider your audience. A B2B audience is likely to be reading their emails on mobile devices, so will probably be reading the text only version of the email (no open logged) and in a similar way if you're content is regarded as viral (discount clothes, chocolate, toys, etc) then your Open Rates will be inflated because those that read the text version of the email or just read it with images off and then forwarded it to someone that DOES download the images, it will log as an open against the original subscribers emails address.
Complex stuff, I could go on, I won't. Sorry for taking up so much space with the monster comment!