Open rates climbing, click rates dropping

Ken Magill reported on a study published by Epsilon (pdf link) on Tuesday. This report shows open rates are climbing but click-through rates are falling.

Average e-mail click-through rates dropped 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2008 from the third to 5.8%, the lowest ever recorded, according to a study released today by Epsilon. […] They are down from 6.1% in 2007 and 6.5% in 2006, according to the marketing services provider. […] According to the study, average open rates increased for the third quarter in a row to 20.9%, up almost 6% from the fourth quarter of last year.

The real factoid that jumped out at me about this is that it clearly demonstrates what a useless metric “open rate” is. As more and more people are, supposedly, reading commercial bulk email fewer and fewer of them are actually clicking on links.
What does this tell us? It tells us that open rate is not a way to tell you anything useful about an email campaign. If a sender can get more people looking at a particular email, and fewer people actually following through on the call to action, then clearly the problem is not that no one is seeing the email. There are lots of reasons why the clickthroughs might be decreasing, but it seems clear from the Epsilon study that simply getting more eyeballs will not fix anything.
Can we now stop using “open rate” to measure anything relevant?

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My job as a consultant does involve answering questions and solving problems. Often the most important, and most overlooked, thing that I do is change the question that clients are asking. It is not that this changes the problem or even, really, changes the solution. It does change how people think of the problem, and changing how they think of the problem drives better solutions.
This can be applied to the current Email Experience Council (EEC) discussion on metrics and defining what a render rate was. Loren has a post up today detailing a number of common email situations and explaining in which cases an email is counted as open and in which cases an email is counted as unopened.
Right now an open in email terms is actually quite simple: a tagged image on a remote webserver was loaded. That’s all an open is. It used to be that no one was blocking images by default, so this was actually quite an accurate way to measure how many people were opening and presumably reading an email (at least for people using mail clients that display HTML and images).
But, as spammers started including more and more explicit images in email, recipients started asking for images to be blocked. In response to recipient requests, ISPs started blocking images by default. No longer was open rate a measure of which recipients opened and read an email, it became a measure of something completely different.
The EEC has recognized this is a problem and have decided that standardization would be a solution. As the first step to standardization they have identified two problems: open rate isn’t calculated in any standard way and the resulting ratio doesn’t describe what most people think it describes. Their recent publication The Email Render Rate defines standard calculations for render rates. This way render rates as reported by different ESPs can be directly compared. Changing the name from open rate to render rate changes what most people expect that the term means. No longer is this a measure of how many recipients opened the mail, but rather it is a measure of how many email clients rendered the images in the mail.
Maybe a better solution could be arrived at by changing the question? Instead of “how can we standardize render rate?” perhaps they should ask the question: “What do people think they’re measuring when they talk about open rates?”
Once the “what?” question is answered, perhaps a good solution to the “how?” question will become more obvious.

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