E-mail open rates declined almost imperceptibly in the first half of 2006, compared to the second half of 2005, according to a benchmark study released last week by e-mail service provider MailerMailer.
The average open rate for e-mails sent by MailerMailer’s customers in the first half of 2006 was 19.1% compared to 19.81% in the second half of 2005, the study said. What does this mean to your business? Absolutely nothing.
First, so-called open rates are an accurate measure of nothing significant. An open is recorded when the receiving computer calls for an HTML graphics file. As a result, e-mail on services where graphics are blocked by default, such as AOL, Gmail and Microsoft may be opened without registering as such. To its credit, MailerMailer points this out in its study.
Also, when an e-mail is displayed in Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane, it registers as having been opened whether it’s been opened or not.
As a result, open rates are arguably the most ridiculously stupid metric in the history of marketing.
In other findings, overall click rates in the first half of 2006 were 3.28% on average compared to 3.3% during the second half of 2005, according to MailerMailer’s study. What does this mean to your business? Absolutely nothing. Should you feel badly if your clicks are below this number? No. Should you feel good if your clicks are above it? No. The only thing you should be comparing your clicks to are your previous efforts’ clicks and your own conversion rates.
The study does contain a bunch of interesting metrics and tips, such as that e-mails with multiple links gets higher click rates than messages with a single link. Useful stuff. You can find it at http://www.mailermailer.com/metrics.
This isn’t necessarily to pick on MailerMailer, though if its executives get hold of this, they’ll sure think it is.
MailerMailer is simply responding to demand. Marketers eat this stuff up. And if we were MailerMailer, we’d publish it, too. Though we might print a few disclaimers explaining what a bunch of hooey we think most “industry benchmarks” are.
The problem is benchmarks are an easy way for the Internet people to tell everyone else in the company their online marketing efforts are doing great without really telling them anything. Saying “our open rates are 2% better than the industry average” sounds fantastic in a meeting of people who don’t know what that sentence really means.
The open-rate metric is to e-mail what “hits” were to e-commerce sites back in the late 90s. A “hit” is recorded whenever the site visitor’s computer calls for a graphic. As a result, a single Web page with a bunch of graphics records a bunch of hits on a single visit. Therefore, the metric is meaningless, but it sure sounded great in 1999 to be able to tell the CEO that the site’s hits were skyrocketing.
No one in direct-mail marketing would ever dream of seriously comparing their response rates to another company’s, much less an entire industry’s. Whether or not a direct marketer’s campaigns are a success depends on their own specific conversion rates, margins, lifetime value of their customers and so much more—each metric being unique to the individual business.
It’s time e-mail marketers grew up and started thinking the same way.
Open rates are arguably the most ridiculously stupid metric in the history of marketing.
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