Repeat opens: the forgotten statistic
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When people look at open rates, they focus on the unique open rate. We take the number of "delivered" emails and see what proportion of those recipients apparently "opened" that email at least once. (See here for background on open rate measurement and use.)Whether someone opened an email once or a hundred times is largely ignored. Mostly because if you want to know how engaging your content or offer is, you look at other numbers. Primarily whether people click on the links.
But sometimes unique open rates and click tracking won't tell you the whole story. You may have email content that isn't intended to get a click. In those cases, looking at repeat opens (how often people open the same email) might help.
Think about simple seasonal greetings or informational, relationship-building newsletters with all the content in the actual email. Neither is likely to generate much in the way of clicks.
So how do you know if recipients value the contents? You look at whether they are triggering repeat opens, either by looking at the email again themselves or by forwarding it around to others.
Consider a test to see which holiday message content is best:
Message A:
- Subject line: Happy Holidays from Mark
- Delivered emails: 5000
- Unique opens: 2,500
- Total opens: 2,600
- Total clicks: 27
- Subject line: Happy Holidays from Mark
- Delivered emails: 5000
- Unique opens: 2,500
- Total opens: 7,500
- Total clicks: 29
It's only when you look at the difference in the repeat opens, as measured through the "total opens" metric that you see that Message B clearly engaged readers more than Message A. Here's a real world example from a case study.
Of course, you need to take a closer look at the source of those repeat opens, too. For example, individuals can sometimes forward an email to hundreds of others via their own distribution lists.
The resultant flood of opens registered against the original recipient's name can skew the total opens result and mislead.
More on statistics | Tags: email marketing metrics, email marketing statistics, open rates, repeat opens, total opens
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | January 14, 2008 | 0 comment(s) - add yours!
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