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I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.
The Open Rate: Rename, Rethink, Redefine
So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?
1. As I understand it, none exist today or in the near future. Some have suggested using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to track opens, but many email clients also block CSS. The major email providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail) can more accurately track "open or read rates" because the email client resides on their servers and does not have to hit an external server. But, the chance of these email providers sharing open data is as likely as world peace.
2. So, let's rename it the "Email Render Rate" or something similar that reflects what the tracking images really measure. My proposed "render rate" would more accurately reflect what occurs when images are loaded in a recipient's email client. This includes in preview panes, software clients such as Outlook or Web-based services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
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This redefinition (nothing else changes) will benefit retailers and others for whom product images are important to conversion. A render rate of 25% lets the sender know that their email rendered with images in 25% of the messages seen by recipients' inboxes or smart phones.
Analyzing the subscriber base by render rate over time would help the marketer better optimize creative for subscribers who normally view images and for those who don't. As smart marketers and the industry make this shift, I'm sure dozens of other creative uses of the render rate would also emerge.
3. Next, let's de-emphasize the open rate and focus the email scorecard on output and business metrics. I'm not devaluing email process metrics. In fact, I find tremendous value in spam-complaint and unsubscribe rates, for example.
But ultimately, the only metrics your CEO and CFO care about are those that measure how the email program supports business goals such as growing revenues, increasing margins, improving customer retention and lowering communications costs.
Use the open rate if you understand its limits and can derive key lessons to improve your email program. More important: Find the key metrics that will enable you to gain a larger share of the marketing budget.
4. Finally, let's set an industry-standard definition for "open rate." I don't expect the render rate or other ideas to replace the open rate anytime soon. And, to be clear, my employer Silverpop is not fast at work to rid the open rate from our reports.
But I do hope those of you who are passionate about this topic will join the discussion and process to help shape a better version of the open rate.
While many of you disagree with me on its value, I see near-unanimous agreement that the open rate has many flaws and needs to change. Please join me on the Email Experience Coalition's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable.
Let the discussion continue!
RSS FEEDS
But for me there remains a real value in using open rates to determine how to improve a future iteration of your message.
Irrespective of the 'true' number of opens you get you can still use the open rate metric to compare campaign A with campaign B. (Provided at least the segmentation is largely the same for both campaigns, otherwise the proportion of users that employ image blocking could skew your results).
CTRs will allow you to compare campaigns as well of course, but open rates have the benefit of only assessing your subject line (and to a lesser extent the time of deployment and From address). That means that you can use open rates to identify more accurately what's good and what's not so good about your message.
If the open rate for campaign B is better than campaign A then the Subject line, from address or time of deployment are driving this rather than the myriad factors in the body of the email.
The CTRs might also tell you that campaign B is better, but it's difficult to be sure which factor is having the effect. Multi-variant testing would tell you, but be honest - who runs MVT in every campaign. And would you want to?
If the CTR is better and the open rate is worse in campaign B, then think about changing your subject line - your results may improve even more. And you would have never known this if you'd only been tracking CTR!!
So, for me the open rate continues to have a real value for direct marketers - granted it's role has changed over the years, but is that any reason to consign it to the emarketing scrap heap?
My sense is that what we are saying is not that there is absolutely no value in a metric that attempts to measure opens/reads/impressions/renders - but simply the definitions and names need to more accurately reflect what is actually being measured. So in a branding sense, think it of it more in terms of a company changing its name to better reflect its current product portfolio and market environments.
We routinely tell our senders to ignore open rates; since opens have historically been used, they still track them of course. But the real metrics showing lift in user response come through click throughs and any downstream business metric -- conversions, average order size, rev and profit per email.
Interestingly the direct marketers get this; they look at CTR's and the rest, but I've noticed the brand marketers are the ones who still tend to cling to opens equally strongly. I guess it comes down to whether your orientation is "impressions" (which "opens" or "render rate" certainly improves -- they see it in a preview pane) vs. "responses" -- assuming we have educated senders, we could be seeing a difference expressive of brand v direct orientation ...
I agree it's less valuable as a critical KPI, but it still has reach value and we won't get away from it until media people quit putting values on CPM and impressions in media that don't show user intent ..
It's not that easy to say it's not important any longer, since it's been a held metric and benchmark for years... I use it for total reach more than campaign over campaign value...but it's also more useful to look at in the domain breakouts and then you can discount the value by environments that are more skeptical in how they render images automatically. But if an email is clicked and opened (Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and alot of other environments that don't support preview panes), it's still valuable as an engagement value. Especially if you are a brand marketer...
Don't discount it too quickly...