Traditionally, the success of email campaigns have been measured by tracking open rates but here are a few reasons why we think that open rates are not the be all and end all of email marketing.

You’re not seeing the whole picture - literally

With open rates, it is more about what you don’t see, than what you see. Let me explain. When an email is registered as “open” you can safely assume that this is true. Your email has in fact been opened. It’s the emails that are marked as “unopened,” that may skew your reports.

A graphic pixel within emails is responsible for reporting open stats. If, however, the graphics are not loaded, the open is not registered. The user may not have their email set up to open in HTML, meaning that your graphics (and therefore your pixel) is invisible and your emails show up as unopened

Many email platforms like Outlook have a preview pane where a user can read the mail without opening it.

Serving up to AI

Many of the emails you send out, will have to travel through the firewalls of company servers. They will get scanned more times than a drug lord going through customs. If your email does not have a stash of cocaine shoved up some terrible orifice, the servers will let it through but not before doing the online version of a cavity search. Yes, you guessed it - they will be opened up thus skewing your open rate stats even further.

They’ve opened - now what?

Since the object of this exercise is converting interest to action, an open email is just that - open. An ace subject line may entice people to open emails. They may even be opening your emails just to scroll down to the unsubscribe link! Bottom line is that if they are not taking any action after having read the email, an email open becomes significantly less important.

So what should I be looking at then?

Good question! Click is not only a 5-letter word. The true measure of a successful email campaign, is achieving a good click-through rate.

Trackable links in your emails show that the person not only opened the email, but also read and engaged with your content. Trackable links also give you a better indication of which information your recipient found more valuable because you can see where they clicked through to.