ICYMI: Email Open Rates are a Pointless Metric Now
sEmail open rates are dead. This is not some clever marketing article where I tell you how everyone is looking at open rates wrong and then share a new way you should look at them.
Nope. This is just an informational article about the fact that email open rates are a totally and utterly worthless metric now. (This may be old news to you, but I speak with enough advisors who are unaware of it that it felt like an article was needed.)
Why? A couple reasons.
Apple Mail’s Privacy Update from a couple years ago. In short, Apple Mail runs a security check on all email in your inbox, which sends your system a false “opened” signal.
On the other end, most mail providers (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) block tracking pixels now, so even when someone does actually open an email, it may not register as having been opened.
For a long time, marketers used open rates as a measure of engagement. If people opened your emails rather than immediately deleting them or ignoring them, that meant they must liked them.
No longer. Using open rates to measure success in email marketing is about as pointless as using minutes spent at the gym to measure effectiveness in working out.
So How Can You Measure Email Success?
Engagement. And by engagement I mean replies and, to a lesser extent, clicks. Encourage your readers to reply. Send them surveys. Ask them to send you stuff.
I also mentioned clicks. Yes, clicks are nice, but they can also be artificially triggered by security software that is designed to cut down on spam. Click rate isn’t quite as worthless as open rate, but it can only be trusted so far.
That is all. I know this is a short one, but I just wanted to put that out there in the hopes that more advisors will stop putting stock in open rates as a measure of effectiveness.
