eROI Days Email Agency

Loren McDonald explains it well. With rapid agreement among email industry insiders, Loren really nailed the answer to the question of the relevancy of the common email metric “open rate.”

The MediaPost article begins:

Email Open Rates: What’s the Alternative?
by Loren McDonald , Thursday, May 8, 2008

MY PREVIOUS COLUMN, “WHY THE Email Open Rate Must Die” spawned a spirited debate, mainly on these three topics (click here to read the first column and all 17 comments):

Don’t kill the open rate, but view it in the proper perspective.
PLEASE let it die!
What can we replace it with? You don’t offer any suggestions other than to say we can do better.

I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.

The Open Rate: Rename, Rethink, Redefine

So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?

1. As I understand it, none exist today or in the near future. Some have suggested using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to track opens, but many email clients also block CSS. The major email providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail) can more accurately track “open or read rates” because the email client resides on their servers and does not have to hit an external server. But, the chance of these email providers sharing open data is as likely as world peace.

2.So, let’s rename it the “Email Render Rate” or something similar that reflects what the tracking images really measure. My proposed “render rate” would more accurately reflect what occurs when images are loaded in a recipient’s email client. This includes in preview panes, software clients such as Outlook or Web-based services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

This redefinition (nothing else changes) will benefit retailers and others for whom product images are important to conversion. A render rate of 25% lets the sender know that their email rendered with images in 25% of the messages seen by recipients’ inboxes or smart phones.

Analyzing the subscriber base by render rate over time would help the marketer better optimize creative for subscribers who normally view images and for those who don’t. As smart marketers and the industry make this shift, I’m sure dozens of other creative uses of the render rate would also emerge.

3.Next, let’s de-emphasize the open rate and focus the email scorecard on output and business metrics. I’m not devaluing email process metrics. In fact, I find tremendous value in spam-complaint and unsubscribe rates, for example.

But ultimately, the only metrics your CEO and CFO care about are those that measure how the email program supports business goals such as growing revenues, increasing margins, improving customer retention and lowering communications costs.

Read the full article here >>