Email Open Rates: What Marketers Need To Know
By Patrick Knight
Whether or not emails are opened consistently is largely based on sender reputation, relevancy, and other factors. Although open rates render inconsistencies, email is very much about building a relationship with your subscribers. As you achieve this through relevant content, setting and honoring expectations, creating trust with your brand, and following best practices, email open rates tend to increase.
An increasing email open rate is indicative of a campaign’s success, even if it’s not absolute. A number of factors can increase open rates, which are the starting point of determining the true impact of your campaign. Increasing email open rates can depend on a variety of factors. For example, open rates only account for HTML emails, not plain text.
Other things to consider: Is the origin of your list in-house or not? Have you emailed these people before? Are you sure this is the content they want to receive? The more you follow best practices and keep up list hygiene, so too will open rates be more optimal. At mobileStorm, we have experienced professionals who can provide guidance on best practices and offer strategic services to ensure that you stay whitelisted as a sender. With our constant monitoring of deliverability statistics and relationships with ESPs like Google, AOL, and Yahoo!, you have the best chance of getting delivered.
Four of the most important factors a marketer can control in terms of increasing open rates are:
• To build ongoing relationships.
• To develop a trusted “from address.”
• To create relevant subject lines and content.
• To encourage recipients to add you to their
safe senders list.
True, by itself an open rate can’t serve as a complete gauge of the impact of the campaign. It is only a starting point, because an “opened email” doesn’t necessarily equate to a “read email.” Moreover, it doesn’t tell you whether or not the recipient completed the marketer’s desired action. Other metrics such as the render rate can help create a more complete picture, with data such as click-through information, delivery failures, conversion data, etc. Having said all that, however, it’s important to know that along with other metrics, the open rate gives you a starting point to determine how your campaign performed.
