Email Marketing
Why tracking email open rates and click-thru rates (CTR) is flawed
It’s an easy trap to fall into, and many people do, but getting overly focused on your email open rates and click-thru rates might not be a good idea – here are a few reasons why…
Email security software
Some businesses, especially larger ones, regularly employ email security layers in their comms platform – in other words, they use software to check emails for any security risks before allowing them onto their internal network where your email subscriber works.
These security solutions, like Mimecast or Barracuda, systematically ‘open‘ every email and ‘click‘ on every link included in your email before determining whether or not to allow it to be forwarded to your intended recipient.
These artificial ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’ will inevitably skew your analytics as your subscribers may not ever read or even open your email, let alone click on links.
This false reporting of opens and clicks also applies to ISPs like Apple who load the ‘tracking pixel’ for every email – again, falsely inflating open rates.
Image Blocking in Emails
Email ‘open’ tracking relies on a hidden image (i.e. a ‘pixel’) loading when an email is opened. If a recipient has images disabled (common in Outlook or Gmail), their ‘open’ won’t be recorded, even if they read the email.
Multiple Device Opens
If a subscriber opens an email on multiple devices (e.g., phone, tablet, desktop), each device can sometimes register as a separate open, inflating the open rate.
Forwarded Emails & Shared Links
If someone forwards your email or shares a link with others, you may see extra opens and clicks that don’t come from the original recipient, again, making engagement metrics less reliable.
I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t track your open rates and CTR, but a better use is to use them as a trending metric – in other words, watch how the rates trend over a period of time.
If you find your email open rates are falling significantly, then this could indicate a problem – and likewise, if they suddenly increase, then you may have done something well to achieve this.
So, in summary, don’t get too tied up in the actual numbers reported by your email marketing platform and instead, use them to track the trend.
The best way to track the performance of your emails is through ‘engagement‘ – arguably a bit more difficult to enumerate, but a much richer data metric when measured. For example, how many subscribers replied to your email, liked your YouTube video or website article, or purchased your product or service (the real ‘engagement’!).
