From the land of meaningless statistics, comes yet another. Epsilon reports for the second quarter of 2009 that “the average second-quarter email open rate across 16 industries now stands at 22.2%, and has increased for the fourth quarter in a row.” This according to Epsilon’s quarterly US email benchmark report for Q209, which measured an 18.2% total increase over Q208.
Email open rates are meaningless. They are just as meaningless as land mail open rates. The difference is that you really can’t measure direct mail open rates, except ultimately by measuring response.
It stems from an inherit flaw in the world of Cyberspace itself, the ability to track almost every action taken electronically by a consumer or on behalf of a consumer. Because we can track email electronically from delivery to click-through, we have yet another meaningless statistic being produced by an industry bent on selling you, the marketer, on the superior advantages of the medium as a marketing tool.
Email that is viewed in an email application in the preview pane, is considered opened. In other words, if I click down the list of the email messages that I receive and each message appears in the preview pane for 1 second, it’s considered opened and viewed. That’s the same thing as tracking land mail that is delivered. It gives you a delivery rate but nothing else. It doesn’t tell you if the person really read the whole message, or even a part of it, anymore than a delivery rate for land mail would tell you if the recipient actually opened the envelop and read the offer.
It’s a meaningless statistic. The real statistic, the only one that counts from a marketing perspective is did the reader do anything as a result of the message. Did they click through to a web page? Did they reply to the message? Did they respond in some way or fashion? And ultimately, did they do something like make a purchase, order or download a white paper, or make a contribution, etc.?
As a marketer, this is the only statistic that I really care about.
