Too often, email marketers get fixated on measuring benchmarking and improving the open and click rates of their email campaigns. But the problem with that is open and click rates are only symptoms of what is actually going on and tell you very little about the cause. As an exercise we looked up the causes of a headache using the symptom checker on WebMD (don’t try this if you tend towards hypochondria), and it threw out 20 possible causes for our headache, ranging from caffeine withdrawal to meningitis – two very different causes indeed!
If you extend the analogy to campaign open and click rates; low or falling numbers may be a result of a number of different factors each requiring a different fix. The numbers do very little to increase your understanding of the cause of the decline, what’s happening to your audience – the people you are trying to reach, engage and ultimately convert. Open and click rates are just a snapshot of the symptoms – and it’s a mistake to focus on them in isolation. The best way to understand what’s going on with your subscriber base is to track open and click behaviour over time.
So what metrics should you be tracking?
Open reach is the total number of unique opens your email campaign attracts over a given period. The greater the number of cumulative unique opens, the greater your chances of making a sale. The more your uniques are growing, ideally in a consistent upward trend, the better you’re doing over the long run.
Frequency tells you how many of your unique openers and clickers go on to open and click one or more additional messages in the month quarter or year.
Different solutions for different problems
Separating out reach and frequency gives you much more insight into why and how your open rates might be falling. And because frequency and reach are very different things, and the tactics for dealing with them are different, you have access to a wider range of remedies than just “I need a better subject line or offer”.
Frequency and reach work together, but the trick with campaign strategy is to balance the claims of each to maximise your returns. In a recent issue of Email-Worx our newsletter, we look at this question in depth and suggest practical remedies to address a falling open rate or click rate.
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