What’s your email Open Rate?

First up – a definition. In this post, as with the report suites on our SmartMail Pro platform, and our Metrics Report, we’ve adopted the name approved by The Email Measurement Accuracy Roundtable of the US DMA/Email Experience Council –that is, ‘render rate’. It’s the same statistic as Open Rate but more accurately describes what happens when the email is ‘counted’*. (More on this below).

Open, or Render rates, have come under scrutiny over the past few years. Just how useful are they?

We think they are pretty handy – as a measure of brand recognition, subject line relevance and delivery, and as a way of benchmarking a series of emails for improvement or otherwise. For example: If your ‘From’ name is recognised as a brand that your recipient has a relationship with, your email is more likely to be opened. If the subject line speaks to their day and their daily needs, sparks their curiosity, or sounds like fun, bingo! If the email didn’t arrive, it’s not going to be opened. So if you see rates going up or down, you’ll know something is changing.

TIP 1: Use open rates as a measure of the email campaign, but keep in mind that this is not a perfect metric. Use alt tags on your images to provide a description of the image, and design your emails so that they make sense without images. Especially, where possible have your calls to action in text – e.g. ‘Read More’ – don’t just rely on an image, tile or button.
TIP 2: Including your brand name in the From address, and/or the Subject line will aid your recipient’s recognition and increase the likelihood that your email is opened. Ensure that your Subject Line is enticing, accurate and closely related to the key benefit of the email.

Open (Render) Rate often vary by List Size

The old sales adage is that it’s ‘a numbers game’. In terms of sheer numbers, clearly if you send your email to a large database, you’d expect to get more response. However, we don’t all have huge databases, and a small list can be just as informative and powerful.

Smaller lists almost always out perform larger lists in metrics. It is easier to keep a smaller list clean. Smaller lists may be used by smaller businesses, so their database is their well-known customer base. Conversely, the largest databases may be run by the companies for whom the database is connected in with billing, so strong efforts are made to ensure the accuracy of the list. Segmenting your database to send more relevant content to smaller groups will produce better results – as can be seen in click through rate and list size in section 5.

TIP 3: It’s possible to treat a large list like a small one by using dynamic content – that is, a tool to enable data fields to change out blocks of content automatically – for example if your recipient is a male, open your email with the image of the footy boots, not the sports bras.

To download your own copy of the Metrics Report for benchmarking click through here.

*How are they measured? Render rates are tracked by the sending servers when an invisible 1×1 pixel image is displayed. This relies on images being displayed in the recipient’s email program. Many email programs block images by default, and many recipients read their emails without downloading images, or they read them on mobile devices – all of which means that the email will not be recorded as opened or ‘Rendered’. Combining render rates with click through rates gives a fuller picture. Often called ‘Opens’ the render rate shows renders from unique subscribers, with the measure taken when an email is displayed (whether fully opened or within the preview pane) by any user. If a user opens the email multiple times, or multiple tracking pixel requests are recorded due to forwarding, only one ‘Open’ is counted per unique email address.

N.B:

This metric is measured for HTML format emails only. Growing prevalence of smart phone use to read emails may well have accounted for international studies some of which have shown as slight downward trend in open rates over recent years….

Different industries are likely to serve different demographics, so business to business communications and those of you with a ‘mobile’ clientele may find your render rate affected. The smarter the phone though the more chance this wont be an issue anymore, as images render into mobiles and the render is counted.

Posted by roanne parker | March 23, 2011