Okay I'm sure I'm going to make some of the marketing community crazy with this, but at least we'll start people talking. Everyone sending email marketing look at their reports to measure the success of their email campaigns. Here is an example result of a campaign.

Emails Sent: 10,500
Emails Delivered: 10,000
Emails Opened: 3,000
Total Clicks from Email: 1,000

10,000 emails were delivered and 3000 people opened the email. That would be a 30% open rate. From that, 1,000 people clicked on a link inside the email or a 10% click thru rate. This is how we’ve always looked at reporting. A 30% tracked open rate is acceptable by most email marketing people, and a 10% click thru rate is also considered pretty good.

But in reality the click thru rate is actually 33%, which is really amazing!  How do I come up with this number?  Actually it's pretty easy and makes perfect sense.  The click thru rate is really a percentage of the Open Rate not the Delivered emails. 3,000 emails were opened which then generates 1,000 click thrus, 1,000 is 33% of 3,000.  In monitoring click thrus, the only relevant number to draw from is the number of people that opened it.  The old way would be like gauging the results of a test in school by the number of kids that didn’t take it.

Now 70% of the emails delivered in this example were not tracked as opened.  Maybe some emails were blocked or filtered by the following means:

• Blocking email (not allowing the email to pass through the server to the recipient because of its originating IP address or Domain),
• Quarantining (holding it for review or until a condition is met like when you get the emails that ask you to click a link and put in a random number/letter combination so they know the email was sent from a real person and not a spam server.),
• Filtering (email filtered out based on subject line and/or content rules, and
• Redirecting (sending the email to a bulk or junk folder).

That means those emails do not qualify against the click thru rate.  The click thru rate should only be measured against the open rate.  So in this case, 3,000 opens and 1,000 clicks, equals a 33% click thru rate.

Some people would think there might be something wrong with the content if the open rate is so low.  Which is of course impossible to know because the recipient would have had to open the email to make a decision about the content.  Now I understand the content might be read by spam filters without being open and that is a concern, but if your sending your email without using some sort of guideline for content that might be picked up by filters then you have much bigger problems.

The real issue here is deliverability to the client’s inbox, and then getting the client to open the email.  The main things to look at are (in no particular order):

• Subject Line (it's what they see first, make it count)
• Content (review the content, check for words, phrases or formatting that might trigger a spam filter)
• From Name & Email Address (this should be recognizable to them, ask them to add your From Email Address to their address book, this helps with delivery and keeps you out of the bulk folder in many cases.)
• Permission/Opt-in (make sure you have permission to email the recipient and that they are expecting your email
• The clients address book (again, ask them to add your From Email Address to their address book)
• Timing (sending on different days and at different times can make a big difference, never send in the middle of the night as your email will be with all the other mail in the morning and may be deleted along with spam)
• Testing, Testing, and Testing (one of the most important thing you can do)

Sending your email to a test group before you send to your active list is very important.  Sign up for all the free email accounts like Yahoo, Hotmail, Excite, Etc. and open an AOL account for testing as well.  This will help you determine what happens when your email is delivered to these providers.  Was it delivered into the inbox, bulk folder, or did it get removed by some filtering system?

If by testing and implementing some of these other measures you could increase your open rate to 60% or 6,000 opened emails on the example above, you would increase your total click from emails to 2000.

So in review, make sure you plan, create, test, send, and track! Then look at the reports and use the clicks from opened emails as your guide.