Spoiler alert — email open rates are misleading at best.

In case you didn’t know, email tracking is a very simple technology. Maybe too simple. There is a small invisible image included with your email that works as a beacon when it is viewed. The logic follows that if an image is viewed, count it as an opened email. So your open rates are directly tied to an email reader’s ability to see images. And that, is a statistical problem. Some very popular email readers like Apple’s iOS devices automatically turn images on. So someone might “look” at your email only to delete it but your open rate records it. Other email clients allow users to read through email without ever downloading images. So if you throw out open rates as statistically irrelevant, how can you judge an email’s success?

Click Throughs

Click throughs tell you how many people felt like you offered them something interesting or valuable enough to pay you a visit by clicking. If you want to judge your email’s engagement, it needs to have a call to action and that link needs to be tracked. Make sure your marketing and communications teams are building their emails around at least one clear call to action.

Campaign Segmentation

With Predictive Response you can go one step further and identify specific pages on your website that indicate your reader is actually engaged. Use our Web Scoring to add additional points to a contact or lead who visits a specific page, or branch them into a campaign reserved for those who have shown a real level engagement. If you want to know more about marketing automation, please don’t hesitate to connect with our team (say “hi” in our Chat window over there in the bottom right corner). We offer quick consulting packs and can help you make the most of your Predictive solution.