In 1594, Shakespeare wrote: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”. Although some words may be better than others to convey the meaning of a marketing term, resistance to change can keep lesser-qualified words in place. Take for example the word “open.”
It would seem to be an easy thing to understand. A door is open or closed (unless it’s ajar-sorry old joke), accounts are open or not, etc. When it comes to email marketing, “open” doesn’t manage to fully define what we’re trying to say. Marketers (and those they report to) look to their Email Service Provider’s reporting data to quantify the success of a campaign.
This includes various metrics including: delivery, opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. Savvy marketers know to review not only the immediate results, but performance over time, against similar prior campaigns, and web analytic/ROI data. This provides a fuller measure of how an email performed during its life.
One statistic in the email realm has always tended to raise eyebrows-the open rate. For an ESP, this is currently measured by someone viewing messages in an HTML email. This sounds like a simple process, but there is a catch. It has become commonplace for email clients to have images off by default. Your recipients must take an action to enable images in order to see them. This not only impacts how you should be designing campaigns, but how you interpret the results.
Industry figures vary, but the average “open” rate is often in the 20-25% range. I’ve spoken to several clients over the years needing to reconfirm the meaning of their results after they had presented campaign data internally. If you’re open rate was 20%, an assumption is made that 80% of your list didn’t open the email (i.e. the opposite). Nothing could be further from the truth, but as they say perception is reality.
By using the word “open” and providing a number/percentage, there’s an immediate reaction that the remainder didn’t open the message. In reality this is a measure of recipient engagement and whether they clicked to enable images in their email client. And we’re only looking at people who have received the HTML version, which for any marketer should be the vast majority of your list.
So what we’re really analyzing is the rate at which recipients enabled or “rendered” images in the email. You can see this as a recipient being more engaged than those who didn’t render images: they took that extra step to see your images. We live in a fast-paced, short attention span world and signs of engagement are priceless. In particular if someone not only viewed images, but also clicked and took the action you desired. These people are your most engaged audience.
So the next time you report your stats to someone, consider adding a definition when it comes to dealing with “opens.” In fact I recommend that you consider adding short definitions for each statistic to help educate others as to what each means. You could include industry benchmarks so you can review your data in contrast to the larger email marketing space (as a whole and/or just your industry specifically if that data is available).
You might even consider renaming the “Open” rose and report instead your “render” rate as part of an overall look at recipient engagement.
What do you think? Have you ever sent a campaign and been challenged internally about the “low open rate?”
