Do declining open rates matter? Yes…and no.
Latest posts | By Mark Brownlow | 13 Comments | Licence this content
So I return from vacation to find the latest MailerMailer report citing average open rates for H2 2009 of 11.2%.
This number has declined every half-year since H1 2004, when it was 26.66%.
Then Litmus reveals that of 4 million opens recorded by their tools, an average 51.1%…”spend less than 2 seconds looking at your email.”
Less than two seconds!
Taken at face value, it seems half a decade of improved understanding, expertise, tools, services and experience, together with tens of thousands of articles and books put out by experts, has resulted in…
Not a lot.
Blimey.
So should you be worried? No…and yes. Here my thoughts…
Image blocking
Open rate drops are partly a consequence of how they are measured. They rely on tiny tracking images, so no open is recorded when images are disabled…even if the recipient reads every word in the message.
So as image blocking was activated by major webmail services and email software manufacturers, open rates declined automatically without implying any equivalent change in actual reader behavior.
But there’s no call for complacency.
Major services and software migrated to default image blocking a while back so recent dips in open rates cannot be explained away like this.
Who cares about open rates?
There’s plenty of debate on the value of open rates as a metric, but all agree it’s a pretty poor absolute measure of email marketing success.
Clicks matter, downloads matter, sales matter.
And email marketing still works, usually competing with search marketing for the title of most effective digital marketing tool.
But if you accept falling open rates as symptomatic of declining attention, then they do still matter.
They matter to newsletter publishers, who need their advertisers’ banners to show up and get seen.
And attention is the start of the chain that leads to all sorts of potential positive outcomes. And not just the traditional online metrics of sales and pageviews.
For example, email also…
- gains you mindshare and awareness
- contributes to the image people have of you and your organization
- encourages people to buy offline
- prompts them to visit your site directly without following an email link
…all of which don’t happen if you don’t first get attention.
Latent value: the nudge effect and the unemotionally subscribed
So declining attention matters.
However, to capture email’s value you don’t need attention all the time. Or even for people to “open” your email.
Dela Quist is more upbeat about low email engagement than most commentators.
He argues that many who open rarely (or not at all) may actually…
“…want to receive your emails, but don’t need your content or offer yet”
In other words, you can’t expect people to avidly consume all your emails. After all, it’s not like banner ads are getting 10% CTR.
An interesting task with your own list is to measure the proportion of recipients who opened at least one email over a given period of time.
You’ll likely discover that the number of intermittent openers is much higher than standalone open rates suggest.
Dela also notes the value of merely landing in the inbox as a driver of action:
“Purchase behavior studies…show spikes over time in purchases from recipients who did not open an email.”
The additional “brand impression” and subject line information can be enough in itself to “nudge” recipients into taking action.
So while we should, of course, work toward improving attention, low levels of engagement are not unexpected. In fact, all things being equal, we would expect open rates (attention) to decline with time.
Most list owners find, for example, that the longer someone is on a list, the less likely they are to open an email.
This chart shows open rates for one B2B newsletter issue for recipients segmented by year of sign-up:
And while attention is limited, competition for attention grows with every passing day…from more senders sending more email and from more alternatives to email.
Averages hide success and opportunity
However, the key phrase is “all things being equal”.
Benchmark open rates come from a mix of senders. Response rates dip with time thanks to fatigue, attrition and competition. So those senders who haven’t changed much, and those still feeling their way with email, will pull averages down.
But there’s a third group actively adjusting and improving their efforts…and seeing open rates and other response metrics rise. I know many blog readers belong to that third group.
Simply, we are each challenged to buck the trend.
Epsilon’s benchmark stats show opens for Q1 2010 higher than Q1 2009. So it’s possible. (Even for those unable to access the kind of tools and resources a typical Epsilon customer might have).
In email marketing, as so often elsewhere, to stand still is to go backwards. And a gentle decline can become a headlong rush as the online landscape grows ever more unforgiving.
And even if a decline leaves you unworried, for the reasons outlined above, why wouldn’t you want to be better than the average?
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13 comments on “Do declining open rates matter? Yes…and no.”
One key thing to remember about open rates is that they can also be artificially inflated. When you receive an email it shows as “unread” in your inbox and one of the quickest ways to mark it as read (and get rid of the bold formatting) is to click or “cursor” down the list. This often gives a false positive open when really all someone has done is skip over your email to mark it as read.We advise all our clients opens rates are good for bigger picture patterns, click through rates are good for more detailed analysis.
Thanks Adam. Yep, I think a lot of those <2 second opens, for example, are the phenomenon you describe.
Hi Mark,
Is there any connection between the frequency of emails (eg daily v once per week) and the open rate?
My open rate is 20` approx which I thought rate poor, though it may be ‘average’ from what I read above.
What is an average open rate? ballpark…
Thanks,
Ivan
Hi Ivan,
The role of frequency depends on what you send. Stock updates may get a higher open rate as a daily email. But generally speaking, the more often you send, the more you have to work to keep open rates up.
Averages also depend on what industry you’re in and what you’re sending. But if you force my hand…there’s an answer here, together with an explanation of whether average open rates play any worthwhile role in email marketing.
Really great information here. This is the kind of stuff people need to read when they are analyzing their email campaigns. The statistics just aren’t as straight forward as people would like to believe.
Thanks for the great post.
With promotional emails concerning retail stores or e-comerce, I generally filter them out of my inbox and only look at them when I need something– like a coupon or to see if there is a sale on. I’m not a very impulsive buyer.
Thanks Dan.
Stephen – yep, you’re the perfect illustration of how difficult it is to identify, for example, truly inactive subscribers. You don’t open or click, but you are still a sale-in-waiting. The articles by Dela Quist I cite talk about this in detail. Thanks for proving the point!
Hi Mark,
Nice encapsulation of the topic. Here in New Zealand email send frequency is far less, with even the most avid retailers sending only one a week. In general monthly sends are most common. Interestingly our open rates (based on downloading images or additional material) is 25%-40%. We put this down to less database fatigue and also from taking the best design features that we can gleam from you guys who have the send numbers and population base to provide research and statistics(Thanks for that!).But we still believe that all of the same rules expressed in your article apply, with emails providing brand awareness, ready when they need it, and the website gateway links.
We intensively manage databases to reduce unsubscribes and maximise open rates… as we don’t have the numbers to lose!
Fascinating Iain! I can see how a smaller potential total audience would encourage people to err on the side of caution re. frequency etc.
And you’re too modest. I know there are many great email folk in NZ, so the rest of the world can learn as much from your experiences as you from theirs.
I think those <2 second opens are fine in a way. People are getting smarter and choosier about what they're interested in. There's probably very little in the way of 3,4,5,6, or 7 second opens. It's either/or – they open and dump or they open and stay.
Focus on why they're staying and emphasize that.
And I think another lesson of that Allan is that you don’t have long to convince people to spend time with your email. So recognition elements etc. are critical…
Two seconds is two seconds more that they were thinking about you and your brand than you had before you sent the email. They probably weren’t thinking much about you and your brand until they saw your email come through. You interrupted their train of thought with a two second message from you and your brand. Done well, a little can mean a lot over the long term.
Agree Logan…this is also the thrust of Dela’s argument…that every impression helps and can bring long-term returns even though short-term email metrics aren’t moving much.