And with big companies like Apple and Google cracking down on email tracking, open rates are becoming less reliable.
Instead, the metrics you need to see actual results are:
interested replies
meetings booked
and business generated.
What are open rates and how relevant are they?
Open rate is the result of a simple calculation: number of emails opened / number of emails sent (percentage).
So, if you send 200 emails and 100 people open your email, you’ll have a 50% open rate. But what does that really mean…
Why have we been tracking open rates?
For years, the #1 goal of open rates was to know if your prospects armenia phone number list were interested in what you sent them by checking if they opened it.
But in the past few years, the most important part of open rates has been to help you see if your emails are being delivered—if you are landing in the inbox or if your emails are going to spam.
We’ve always recommended having a >50% open rate, meaning you don’t have an issue with your deliverability.
I Got a 90% Email Open Rate With Those 7 Strategies
But because of the new privacy updates, open rates will no longer be the go-to metric for email deliverability (we’ll get to this topic in a minute).
Another use of open rates has been to determine if your subject lines perform well or not. The logic behind this is pretty simple: if an email was opened out of all the emails in the inbox it was probably thanks to the subject line and/or the email’s first line, right?
Well, it turns out it was too good to be true.
After testing 20+ of our competitors (Salesloft, Outreach, Mailshake, Woodpecker, Reply etc….) we realized that open rates are being calculated with misleading information.
So the open rate you see isn’t a good predictor of how many people opened your email thanks to the subject line or email’s first line.
Two approaches to open rates
We find the technical explanation (don’t worry it’s not as scary as you think) to why cold email open rates aren’t working for you and solutions on the business side.
The technical explanation
To make long story short, inboxes are screwing us over.
How?
For safety/privacy reasons, some inboxes have spam filters and bots that open your emails and click on the links you have in them. This means that it’s counted as an open or a click when actually the prospect may have never opened the email in the first place. Worse, the bots/spam filters may have put your email directly in the spam folder.
If the email you sent is deleted (or even bounced after being opened by a bot) without the lead reading the emails, it’ll get marked as opened. Even if your lead didn’t read the message.
Some email providers (like Outlook) have a preview mode so people can “open” the email without actually opening it, they are just moving/deleting it. So even though the lead only clicked on it long enough to move it, this counts as an open.
That means a ton of emails are being marked as opened that might not even make it to the inbox. And there are a good amount of emails being read that aren’t tracked.
But that’s not even the height of the technical problems. With the latest Google update, tracking open rates increases your likelihood of landing in spam.
Remove tracking for better deliverability
How? All email tools add a pixel to your emails to track the opens. But recently we’ve seen some changes in Google’s algorithm…
So we bulk analyzed 10s of millions of cold emails sent by our 65,000+ users worldwide to make sure that having a pixel or image will not decrease your deliverability.
We found out that spam filters used by ESPs (Email Service Providers) can easily differentiate an image vs. a tracking pixel.
When a tracking pixel is used, the likelihood of your emails landing in SPAM was 15% higher than without tracking.
However, images did not impact the deliverability at all.
The business metrics that matter
Don’t worry, by not tracking open rates you aren’t losing any vital information.
The truth is that open rates have nothing to do with the success of your outreach or the growth of your business.
Instead, here are the most important metrics you should focus on:
Business generated (dollar bills y’all)
By far the best metric to focus on is how successful your campaign ultimately was.
You’re measuring the amount of prospects that made their way through the entire sales funnel and that have acquired your product or service.
Qualified meetings booked
Your campaign has been successful, it’s attracted the attention of your prospects to the point where they’ve set aside time out of their day to meet with you.
Here you know the impact of your campaign and your product or service.
