This drives me crazy.
I keep hearing so-called planned giving experts congratulate themselves for getting phenomenal open rates from their e-blasts even though email open rates don’t matter whatsoever.
Here are 2 huge reasons why email open rates are meaningless.
- The technology used to track an “open” uses an HTML IMG tag embedded in the outgoing emails. This is a tiny, transparent tracking image that tries to determine when a person’s email browser displays the email. Problem is, this reporting mechanism has no idea whether or not a human actually opened the message. Many browsers these days open messages automatically. Outlook, for instance, has a preview pane that records emails as “opened.”
- This reporting mechanism has no idea whatsoever if an opened message (by the browser or a human) was actually seen or read by the target/prospect.
The only reason to consider looking at open rates.
There’s really only one way to use open rates and that’s to compare two emails that are identical in every respect but have different subject lines. Then, if one garners a higher open rate, you’ll know that that subject line caused the increase.
So what should you track?
Next time a vendor tries to tell you about their open rates, ask them to give you stats on the true measures of success. They are:
- Clicks
- Engagement online and offline as a result of the blast (time on site, number of pages visited, inbound phone calls/emails, etc.)
- Conversions (forms filled, downloads, video views, donations, etc.)
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