Email Metrics Reports - Apples vs. Oranges

August 18th, 2006 by Kelly Rusk

I’m always curious to read email marketing reports and trends related to metrics and response rates. This morning when I received an eMarketer email referencing a new report, it caught my eye.

For some background, it’s a report from Harte-Hanks and its e-mail subsidiary Postfuture. (View the report) It compares the aggregate e-mail metrics of 4,300 business and consumer e-mail campaigns. The analysis included both marketing and transaction e-mails. Transaction emails? Well doesn’t that mess up the numbers in a huge way! Of course transaction emails are going to have a very high response! Including transaction emails together with marketing emails makes no sense at all.

Then I almost fell off my chair when I glanced at the average reported open rates. Get this…this report states an average open rate of 78.8% !!! (See chart above) So again, I looked at how this could be. Well it turns out that this reported open rate is not unique opens! Nope. It’s total number of opens. So whether someone opened the email once or ten times or whether it was passed along and opened by someone else…every open was counted and recorded.

I find this crazy. Marketers who don’t look closely at how these guys captured their numbers are going to feel very self-conscious about their results because if you take unique opens and only marketing emails, the numbers are quite different. Take a look at our 2006 Q1 and Q2 email marketing trends reports and you’ll see what I mean. And our clients typically get better results than the average do it yourself e-marketer so go figure!

Posted in Email marketing |