I totally get it. Open rates are important. Heck, I look at them as well but it’s typically not the first thing I look at. If I have an open rate of 25%, I don’t woop it up exclaiming to the team that we have success. No way. Why? Because it doesn’t matter if every single person opened my email if nobody took the action I wanted them to take. Think I look at click-throughs? Think again. What I look at is the actual return as in the conversions. How many clicked through intentionally, and landed where they intended to land? What did they do? Complete the form? Watch the video? Did they do what I wanted them to do?

Now if you wanted them to simply open your email, then look at open rates all day long. But why on earth would you run a campaign with the goal being driven by open rates?

I felt the need to blog about this today because I read a recent report published by Forrester that stated 80% of marketers surveyed measure the response rates first and foremost. The statistic drops down considerably to 41% measuring against improvement in lead generation and 40% for incremental revenue.

Response rates are more important than incremental revenue?

It started to remind me of all the graphs floating around stating that Pinterest yielded the highest referral rates when compared to other social networks. Yet, no one – to my knowledge – ahs stated boo about the revenue associated with all this awesome traffic. We are just saying more people landed on our site.

Are more eyeballs better than more money in the bank? No way man! And if you think yes, you are thinking too heavily on the numbers that make you look good because I’m guessing you got a lot of referral traffic from Pinterest. No?

Prove me wrong. Someone show me wher it matters that my referral traffic went up. Someone please show me why open rates are something we should measure and measure above revenue and lead generation.

Let’s start measuring our effectiveness by looking at how many new names we generated.

Let’s start paying attention to the people that performed the action we wanted them to.

Let’s pay more attention to our impact on the business i.e. the bank account.

Let’s show how we provide value to the organization.

Your CEO doesn’t care about open rates so you shouldn’t either. Use them to toggle with your subject lines but that’s it.