Open rates climbing, click rates dropping

Ken Magill reported on a study published by Epsilon (pdf link) on Tuesday. This report shows open rates are climbing but click-through rates are falling.

Average e-mail click-through rates dropped 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2008 from the third to 5.8%, the lowest ever recorded, according to a study released today by Epsilon. […] They are down from 6.1% in 2007 and 6.5% in 2006, according to the marketing services provider. […] According to the study, average open rates increased for the third quarter in a row to 20.9%, up almost 6% from the fourth quarter of last year.

The real factoid that jumped out at me about this is that it clearly demonstrates what a useless metric “open rate” is. As more and more people are, supposedly, reading commercial bulk email fewer and fewer of them are actually clicking on links.
What does this tell us? It tells us that open rate is not a way to tell you anything useful about an email campaign. If a sender can get more people looking at a particular email, and fewer people actually following through on the call to action, then clearly the problem is not that no one is seeing the email. There are lots of reasons why the clickthroughs might be decreasing, but it seems clear from the Epsilon study that simply getting more eyeballs will not fix anything.
Can we now stop using “open rate” to measure anything relevant?

Related Posts

$234M default judgment against spammers

MySpace has won a 234 million dollar judgment against Walt Rines and Sanford Wallace.
“MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” [MySpace Chief Privacy officer] Nigam said in a statement. “We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.”
These are two of the spammers responsible for me learning to read headers and report spam. Both of them have previous judgments against them. Wallace sued AOL to force AOL to accept his mail. Eventually the judge ruled against Cyber Promotions and Wallace.

Read More

The overlooked secret of marketing

Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time

Read More

Verifying email addresses

Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it:

Read More