Do open rates still matter?

Amazing, thanks Brian.

Digging in!

J

Welcome to the community @jjgilles! This is a great question.

Something for you to consider in addition to the threads provided by @Brian Turcotte  - evaluate your “revenue per recipient” metrics between campaigns and flows. This will give you useful insights into which segments of your list/ what types of customers are most valuable. Typically, it’s higher and will become somewhat predictable month-to-month with flow emails. Campaigns tend to have a lower $/ recipient, since flow emails are more often sent at a relevant purchasing time, depending on the latest action or inaction someone has taken. 

Open rates help give you useful signals to evaluate deliverability. It’s our understanding at ebusiness pros that despite the MPP opens, email providers like Gmail still use open rates as a broadly evaluated factor to determine whether or not your emails are worthy of making it to the inbox/ promo tab, rather than the spam folder - or in best cases, making it into the primary inbox instead of the promo tab.  So it’s not as meaningful for tracking engagement, but does still hold value to an extent.

When it comes to evaluating engagement, click rates are a more reliable metric than open rates. Order rates are also important, and tie back to that $/ recipient metric. They all factor in together, but hopefully hearing how we determine the hierarchy of these metrics in our own work is helpful to you!

Warmly,

Gabrielle

Klaviyo Champion & Marketing Lead at ebusiness pros

Hi @jjgilles Thanks for posting. Just adding to comments by @Brian Turcotte and @ebusiness pros 

Something else that can muddy the waters is automated clicks: email systems that click through all links in the email to evaluate the link content for malware before it passes to the recipient. I’ve seen this occur with business emails and with other institutional emails e.g. Education. A consideration if they are one’s primary audiences.

Regards

Andy