Depending upon what the ultimate goal of your email marketing campaign is, the open rate has limited significance. For a long time, companies have placed a lot of weight upon open rates, seeing it as a measure of campaign effectiveness. However, it is not only unable to provide any deep insight into customer response, but it is also subject to great inaccuracy.

One of the biggest problems with open rates is that they are defined differently by Email Service Providers. Many people now view their emails through a preview pane, something which is classed as an ‘opened email’ in some email reports, and not in others. The line is also blurred by disabled images and non html friendly mobile phones, both of which cause more ambiguity as to whether an email is recorded as having been opened or not.

Even forgetting the weaknesses in determining open rate, the figure still isn’t a very useful tool for measuring campaign success. What is the ultimate goal of your e-marketing campaign – to get recipients to fill in a form, purchase your product or subscribe to a newsletter? All of these actions require the recipient to travel much further down the sales path, and so the open rate is not a very accurate indicator of a campaign’s true performance.

The open rate is unable to provide any information beyond that the email was opened. It does not shed any light on what the recipient did after the email was opened. Did they click off the email immediately when they read the header? How much of the email did they read? The open rate tells you only how well people have responded to a combination of your subject line, and your company’s name, which is in the ‘from’ field.

So, why do we calculate the open rate at all? Because, as with most statistics, whilst the open rate may not tell you much in isolation, as a part of a bigger picture it can highlight important information. The open rate is significant insofar that it is the first ‘hurdle’ to pass over to get closer to your ultimate objective. If you are finding that a large group of people aren’t opening your emails, it may be necessary to test out different subject lines, alter the ‘from’ address, or maybe even double check that your emails are being delivered. After all, anybody that doesn’t get past the first hurdle certainly won’t be making it to the last.