Despite the rise of social media, email marketing is still key to many websites’ relational and sales strategies. As with anything to do with digital marketing, there are numerous metrics and acronyms associated with email marketing, but some of which have too much weight placed on them at the expense of others.

A great example of this is the importance people place on open rate, often at the expense of click through rate and conversions. In fact, I would argue conversion rate and ROI is typically overlooked when analysing a newsletter’s effectiveness.  If you send out regular promotional emails and/ or newsletters to your subscriber list and you are focusing on how to improve your open rate, you are chasing the wrong data.

View it as a process

It is important not to look at these stats as being independent of each other and focusing on one specific metric. You could improve open rate by using cryptic subject lines, but that wouldn’t improve your click through rate, in fact it would probably increase your unsubscribes. On the flip side, you could increase click through rate and conversions by offering an incredible deal, but if not enough people open the email to make the deal worthwhile, it is irrelevant.

Quality over quantity

In an ideal world we would see 100% of people open their email and convert 100% of the time, but that simply won’t happen. I would argue it is better to have fewer people open your email and act on it, than have a higher open rate but no one performs any action.

To illustrate this, if we look at the example below (which presumes a product value of £20), focusing on the open rate figure would suggest that newsletter B is the more effective of the two. However, if we look at the click through rate and ROI as well, we can see that despite sending us less traffic, newsletter A is worth more to us.

	A	B
Emails sent	10,000	10,000
Emails opened	1,500	3,000
Open rate	15%	30%
Click through rate	30%	10%
Clicks	450	300
Conversion rate	10%	10%
Sales	45	30
ROI	£900	£600

.

Improving your email marketing

I won’t cover ground that has been done many times before by people who know much more than me about this subject. Instead, I’ll point you in their direction:

•  Email marketing field guide: https://resources.mailchimp.com/email-marketing-field-guide

•  Email design guidelines: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/

•  General email marketing strategy guide: https://www.davechaffey.com/guides/email-marketing-strategy-guide

•  Round up of useful email marketing blog posts on SitePoint: https://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/09/16/the-ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing/