There’s no doubt your business wants its marketing to succeed. But how will you know if you’ve reached your goals if your efforts aren’t measurable?
Every marketing solution has different ways to measure success. For email marketing, open rate and click-through rates are two important metrics to determine the success of your campaign. Here’s what you need to know about these metrics.
Open Rate vs Click-Through Rate: What’s the Difference?
What is Click-Through Rate?
Click-through rate measures the number of times a link, a call to action, or image was clicked (at least once).
What is Open Rate?
Open rate is the number of email recipients (out of the total number of subscribers you sent the email to) who open a specific email.
The Value of Both Measurements
Each measurement can be used to pinpoint problems along your digital marketing campaign journey.
Click-through rate can:
- Help you understand how good your link placement is
- Gauge overall interest in your emails
- Alert you of email fatigue within your subscribers
- Measure the quality of your email content
- Gauge the performance of the media within your email
- Gauge the quality of the links you’ve included in your message
Open rate can:
- Let you know how enticing your subject lines are
- Help you understand if you’re sending the right content to the right segment of your audience
- Help you gauge when you’re sending emails too frequently
- Help you gauge when you’re not sending emails frequently enough
If you have a low click-through rate but a high open rate, that might mean that your emails are perfectly fine, but you’re wasting your time sending them to people who aren’t interested.
It could also mean that people are interested in the subject line to open the email, but they aren't motivated to click through — your CTA could need work, the messaging could need work, or you might have a disengaged audience. It’s worth analyzing to see what answer fits your situation best.
If you have a low open rate, that could mean your emails and their content need work. You could be sending emails too frequently or your subject lines may not be compelling. This is common when sending emails to your entire database, rather than segmenting your audience.
Why Should I Monitor Open Rates and Click-Through Rates?
Measuring your open rates and click-through rates lets you make the very most of your marketing campaign.
Open rate portrays how well your email marketing efforts are going; how can you better your strategy if you don’t know how it’s performing in the first place? After all, if people don’t open your emails, the rest of your marketing campaign might very well fall on its face.
Your click-through rate is important because it lets you know how compelling your content is from the perspective of your audience, providing insight on what marketing strategies work and what ones don’t.
Though there are certainly situations where one rate is more important to measure than the other, knowing (and understanding) both rates is beneficial to all of your marketing campaigns.
Understanding Email Marketing Metrics
Of course, there are other email marketing metrics that matter – like delivery and conversion rates, bounces, and unsubscribes, but open rate and click-through rate tell the story that headlines the page: what does my audience find interesting and valuable enough to not only open, but also to read through and click through to your website?
Making sure your emails remain relevant is key to putting money, time, and effort towards worthwhile email campaigns.
To learn more about email marketing metrics and what works best for your business, reach out to Federated Media today. We’re the experts in all things marketing, and we’ll put our expertise to work for a successful email campaign for your business.
