The Whitelist

The obsession with open rates. How common is this affliction?
 
One of our team members here at email marketing vendor ClickMail Marketing recently spoke with a marketer unhappy with the open rates and click throughs of a recent email marketing campaign. When asked what the conversion rate was, she was told there was no way to tell because the sales process took months. How, he asked, can we get these people to open our emails?
 

Last year this same marketer had a very high open rates with an email that had nothing to do with selling his product. It was simply a link to a video by a well-known person in the field. The open rates were over 50%. The video was giving a sales pitch, so the email was in fact a marketing email. But who became a customer as a result of watching the video? No idea. We don’t even know who watched the entire video once they realized it was a sales pitch.
 
The email that prompted this conversation had an open rate of 13% and a click through rate of 3%. That didn’t worry the email copywriter, because even if the list was 2,000 names, that means 8 people clicked through to download more information…8 people that can now get a follow up message.
 
Granted 8 is a very small number. But this isn’t a business that emails a list of 40,000 email addresses. This is a very small business selling within a very targeted industry. And one salesperson. And an email list that’s not made up of permission based emails. And the email was sent January 6, following the holidays and the barrage of email messages that December brings.
 
For our team member, that open rate means much less than the end result: Did we get a sale? Or 2 or even 8 sales? Then open rate be damned. We did good.
 
I’m not saying open rates don’t matter! The more people who open your email message, the more chances you have to convert. But if your highest open rates come from emails that don’t convert, then yes, you’re getting the open rate but not the email marketing ROI. If your open rates or low but you’re making sales, then your email marketing ROI goes up.
 
Pay attention to your open rates, but don’t get obsessed with them. Keep your eye on the numbers that really matter, the ones that make you money and give you the best email marketing ROI.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.