Important Metrics

Open rate fallacy

One of the most common mistakes we see in email marketing is judging the quality of an email solely by open rate.

Open rate is actually unrelated to the content of that specific email—people haven’t seen inside it yet.

Nonetheless, it’s your first impression and you want to optimize it. We’ll touch on this in a moment.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR measures the percentage of recipients who click any link within your email. That’s a more meaningful metric of how well your email is resonating than purely its open rate.

Tip: To make this metric even more meaningful, focus on the number of people who click after opening—this will exclude people for whom the subject wasn’t appealing.

Ways to improve CTR:

• Segment emails so the different types of buyer personas see what most appeals to them. We’ll cover this shortly.
• Have one clear goal per email.
• Use a call to value instead of a call to action—call to value means replacing your generic CTAs with clear value. Think of a cooking supplies site that sends out an email with a link to a blog post. Change the “Read the blog post here” button with a “Learn exactly how to make sourdough”

Open reach

Open reach is a proxy for email engagement. It’s the number of subscribers who open at least one of your emails over the number of subscribers who received at least one email from you, over a period of time (say, 30 days).
Not everyone will open all of your emails. So instead of using open rate, which is on an email to email basis, use open reach to determine how many of your subscribers engage with at least one of your emails in the last measurement period.