In my experience, while email open rates are important, they aren’t the MOST important metric when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of a specific email or email strategy.

Maybe you’ve asked yourself:
“Is my email open rate any good?”
“What open rate should I expect?”
“Why aren’t more people opening my emails?”

That’s a REALLY tough question to answer (without knowing more information)…
Trying to figure out what a good open rate is, is like trying to figure out how fast water rolls down a hill…
There are SO many factors you have to consider..

For instance:
– How targeted is the list?
– How good is the relationship with your list?
– Is there a clear call to action or offer?

If you have a poor relationship with your list, your open rates might be really low…but it’s not an email open rate problem, it’s a relationship problem.

(If your car tires keep wearing unevenly it’s most likely not a tire problem…it may be a wheel alignment problem. If you fix the alignment, the tires will wear evenly.)

By fixing the root cause of the problem, you’ll start to see an increase in open rates…
But I’ve found that open rates are a misleading metric that can take your eyes of the more important metric:
Engagement.

Engagement could be a number of things:
– responding to the email
– clicking a link
– making a purchase
– submitting a form

In other words: Engagement is the action you want them to take.
An email might have a 10% open rate, but an engagement rate of 60%.
That’s pretty dang good…

For a few reasons:
– It means that the email was targeted to the right people (even though it’s a 10% open rate which may seem small, the email was only targeted at a specific segment of the list. The goal is not to get as many people to open the email, it’s to get the RIGHT people to open the email).
– The message and offer in the email was a success. It resonated with the audience. 6 out of 10 users engaged.
If the engagement metric was “New Signups” and the list is 100k, that’s another 6000 users.
And at the end of the month these sales can be traced back to a specific email…
This allows you put a $ value on each email open.

In the above example, the revenue per email open is $29…for every email that is opened, you will generate $29.
That ain’t bad.
And the better your relationship is with your list, the more revenue you’ll see.
If you’re not sure how your relationship is with your list, that’s OK…

By making a these small changes to your email strategy you can improve your relationship, get more engagement and most importantly, see more revenue.

If you’d like to learn other changes you can make to your email strategy, improve the relationship with your list and start generating more revenue, I wrote a guide with 5 hacks you can use to do just that. If you’d like a copy, shoot me a quick email at [email protected].