The Key Metric: Clicks to Opens

How wonderful. Your unsubscribe rate is miniscule. Your open rates are high. Your e-zine is doing great, right?

Think again. These metrics are meaningless in telling you if you have a successful newsletter. So says Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy at Silverpop Systems.

“The unsubscribe rate is a terrible measure of e-mail success,” she says. “If it’s flat, it doesn’t mean anything. But it can be a decent measure of failure.”

It’s the same with bounces and opens.

“The bounce rate is useful for evaluating appends, list rentals or odd lists,” O’Gorman continues. “The open rate is using for evaluating the combination of your brand value and your subject line.”

And the click-through rate allows you to assess your call-to-action and individual stories and elements. But it is not the real measures of success.

So what is?

Clicks to opens. That is, “your clicks divided by your opens. That tells you, how you did do once they’re open.” (It can, of course, be measured only with HTLM e-mails).

According to O’Gorman, this is a much better metric than clicks to the number of e-mails sent because those subscribers may not have even gotten it.

What’s a decent click-to-open average?

“Averages don’t matter,” O’Gorman says. “What you need to know is how you compare to averages for your industry and for the type of mailing you send.”

Click-through rates aside, O’Gorman goes on to challenge some common beliefs about deliverability.

One is that your service provider can get you through spam filters through the power of personal relationships. “Having the right e-mail provider will increase your deliverability,” she says. “But it’s not based on the relationship with an ISP.”

Another is that your content will get you blocked.

“Content filters play a surprisingly small role in deliverability,” she says. “List hygiene is more important than worrying about which word it is.”

Any tips on that?

O’Gorman notes that “ISPs hate bounced addresses. Clean them off quickly and permanently, and be conservative with your bounce rules.” (See separate article).

She adds: “Keep your lists fresh. Any addresses not mailed to for six months should be quarantined and resolicited.”

And make sure that your e-mail “doesn’t look spammy.” You can do that through the “heavy, consistent use of the brand or product.”

She continues: “Remember that image disabling is increasingly common. Avoid single-image “postcard” graphics, and test e-mails with the images disabled….

O’Gorman concludes with these thoughts on e-mail in general:

*E-mail is a fundamentally immature medium.

*Mistakes are common due to lack of institutionalized knowledge..

*Isolation of e-mail marketers is common. Typically, they are the only ones at a company who know a lot about it.

*Mistakes in e-mail can be more costly than in other media.

This article is based on a session given by Elaine O’Gorman at ACC 2005, this year’s catalog conference in Orlando.