Changing our Email Lexicon: An open by any other name
Posted by Rob Ropars on June 26th, 2009
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.
