2011
Opens vs. Clicks – Whats more important?
Email Marketing Services generally have three different point of data that they report on after sending an email campaign: Delivery Status, Opened, Clicked.
The Delivery Status lets you know whether the email was delivered to the recipient, if it bounced, was blocked, or if the address is non-existant. The Open rate shows you the number of people or percentage of people who received the email that opened it. The Click rate shows you the number of people or percentage of people who opened the email that clicked a link.
So which one is most important?
Delivery Status is obviously quite an important statistic. Knowing if your messages were delivered, and who didn’t get them, is a vital piece of information. It indicates bad email addresses, people who have left companies, and is a sign that you should send them some kind of follow-up.
Open rates is an interesting statistic. It has come under quite a bit of scrutiny for not being entirely accurate. Tracking email opens is often done by putting an image in the email, where the downloading of the image when the email is open indicates that it was read. This statistic is skewed because some email clients don’t download images automatically. Some email clients also download images once you’ve clicked them due to preview panes, which means a persons “open” could actually just be them clicking on the message to delete it.
Probably the best indicator of the success of your email campaign in the Click Rate. It is the only way to know for certain that the recipient read your email, and tells you that they were interested enough to want to see more information. While email opens can indicate many things, the clicks indicate real interest, or at the very least a healthy curiosity.