This article takes a revolutionary look at the holy open rate and lists other metrics that can draw a more meaningful picture of your email program and its strengths and weaknesses.

Well, sort of. The open rate obviously matters to an extent, but other metrics are generally much more important in judging the success of your email campaigns and newsletters.

If your goal is just to have your recipients read your message, then the open rate is a key stat. If you want to use your email to get people to act, you must create the right combination of click-through and conversion rates to deliver the highest results.

The open rate is an important indicator -- you do have to know if your email is getting opened and read -- but it's imprecise at best and a more reliable indicator of long-term trends rather than immediate predicting of success.

We at EmailLabs have developed the clicks-times-conversion rate, which more reliably measures a core metric of success: the ability of the email in combination with landing page or Web site to generate your desired actions per campaign.

Beyond the Open Rate

Here's a radical (to some) thought: You can end up with more orders (or whatever your desired action is) on a campaign with a 25% to 30% open rate than on one with a 50% or higher open if you optimize the campaign for the highest click-through and conversion rates.

You could even end up driving down click and conversion rates if you focus too much effort on getting people to open your message and not enough on the email itself, the landing page at your site and other factors.

Here's the key: Design the email message so that it compels recipients not only to open it but also to click on your offer and take the desired action -- to visit or register at your site, buy a product, request information, join your mailing list, download games or whitepapers, whatever you want them to do -- and then make it easy to convert once they hit your site.

You must examine all of the key elements of an email message: the subject line, the offer and the design -- design, layout, images and colors in HTML emails, and paragraph design and offer placement in text messages. You can't just throw in a grabby subject line and then expect recipients to figure out the rest for themselves.

Ideally, you should be able to target your message to specific subgroups of your mailing list, based on demographic data, buying history, content preferences and the like.

If you don't have enough data to segment your list precisely enough, or if you have an offer that doesn't fit well with your current segments, you can instead create an email that offers a clear, compelling appeal to a high-value subgroup of your subscribers.

Don't be nervous about sending out an offer with what looks like a
narrow appeal to your whole list. Sure, it might not appeal to 75% of your list. But, if the offer or benefit is clear and compelling enough, that other 25% should snap to attention and act.

How Clicks-times-Conversion Works

We recently analyzed a retailing client's campaign performance -- 50 individual messages over two years. We noticed something interesting, though not surprising, that many of the campaigns with the highest open rates didn't produce in the top tier ratio of orders per campaign.

So, we reanalyzed the statistics and found that mixing the click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rates actually related much more strongly to more successful campaigns than anything involving the open rate.

To get the clicks-times-conversion rate, simply multiply the total CTR for the campaign (explanation below) by the conversion rate.

Look at the chart below. You'll see that the highest number of orders per delivered email (sent minus hard bounces) lines up with the highest clicks-times-conversion rate. Yet the open rates for some are well below some of the others campaigns.

You'll also see that the campaign that generated the most opens in the survey period -- a very respectable 39.9 percent -- produced the same orders/delivered and clicks-to-conversion rates as did one with a significantly lower open rate of 23.04 percent. Another example, the message with the lowest open rate (19.10 percent) greatly outperformed the message with the second highest open rate at 39.77 percent.

The takeaway: Clearly this is not rocket science as conversion rates have alsways been king. But we believe that the above analysis provides further support that click and conversion rates working together correlate much more strongly to the order rate than the open rate does.

The Next Step: Happy Landings

Having a strong email message isn't the last step in an email campaign that seeks to drive movement to a Web site for whatever purpose. You have to deliver them to a landing page that makes it easy for them to take the desired action.

Abandoned shopping carts are already a big headache for online retailers, but a bad landing page means site visitors won't even start shopping if they can't figure out what to do or why they should make the effort. 

A good landing page works in tandem with an effective email campaign. Your Web analytics solution should tell you what pages your site visitors are on and where they go after they leave your landing page. If the click rates for a campaign are strong, but your orders and conversion rate are low, then your visitors are hitting the landing page and then disappearing.

What to do? Go back and test the page again. The problem could be as simple as a key link not working. Or, the email and Web offers don't synch.

Or, the page is confusing. If you want email recipients to buy a specific product, don't send recipients to your homepage with no further direction. You might have to test several different versions of the email message -- varied by subject line, offer, surrounding content -- and landing pages to find one that works.

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