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Cold email open rates are generally considered the gold standard for measuring campaign success. But are they truly telling the whole story?
If you rely solely on open rates to measure the effectiveness of your cold emails, you may be missing the bigger picture.
Although open rates are associated with successful deliverability, and a sign of prospect interest, we found that good open rates are not reliable indicators of overall cold email success, as we discovered when analyzing 5M+ email campaigns sent by Saleshandy.
This blog will explain why open rates can mislead and suggest you comprehensive ways to measure success.
Why open rates can mislead?
It has been widely believed that high open rates are key to cold email success. As a rule, open rates are calculated by dividing the number of emails sent by the number of emails opened. Therefore, a higher number is considered a positive indicator for various cold emailing methods.
However, a closer look at user data has revealed that this belief is only partially correct.
Open rates are undeniably important, but there are many misconceptions related to them, which directly hampers your ability to measure the accurate performance of your campaigns.
Let’s discuss the major assumptions or misconceptions about open rates in detail.
Assumption 1: A high open rate means more responses
It is commonly believed that higher open rates lead to more responses. Therefore, it is assumed that prospects will likely respond to emails they have opened.
However, this isn’t always true. Let’s see why.
Here are the stats of one of our user’s cold email campaigns.
As you can it is evident from the results that the given campaigns have received phenomenal results in terms of opens. It consistently exceeds the 50% benchmark for open rates. However, contrary to this, cold email responses received are negligible in comparison.
Therefore, even though the open is consistently higher than average, we cannot consider this performance as a winner.
A number of factors can influence open rates and response rates.
- It is possible for recipients to open an email out of curiosity or to delete it without further action.
- A person may open an email but not respond due to a lack of time, relevance, or interest.
- Many ESPs can inflate open rates (mark emails open by default) automatically without necessarily reflecting genuine engagement with recipients.
Assumption 2: High open rates indicate a good target audience
We found that open rates are not always an indication of a good target market.
For the fact, a high open rate may indicate that many recipients are interested in the subject line, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the entire target audience will respond.
The relevance of the email content, the timing, and recipient preferences can also influence open rates.
A well-targeted email sent to a well-segmented audience may result in high open rates, but if the content is not relevant or compelling, it may not produce the desired results.
Assumption 3: High open rates mean prospects are interested
If your cold email is opened, it doesn’t mean prospects are taking the time to read what you have to say.
An open rate by itself does not provide a comprehensive measure of response quality. It’s interesting to note that recipients who are engaged and genuinely interested can still respond with high quality despite low open rates.
The given user cold email stats show that open rates are consistently average, but reply rates are significantly higher. It is not easy to make it a general case, but it breaks the myth that high open rates indicate prospects’ interest.
You may not be getting replies despite having high open rates for many reasons:
- Your email copies are generic, and it does not invoke any curiosity in the prospect
- Your recipients just preview your emails on different devices (most likely phones)
- Email subject lines may be catchy, but email copy fails to deliver
Assumption 4: High open rates indicate scalability
It is not that straightforward to scale up your cold emails with the same results as in a small volume, even if your open rates are high.
Cold email open rates are often calculated relative to one another rather than on absolute numbers, which can be misleading.
Suppose you sent out 1000 emails and received a 25% open rate, which means 250 emails were opened. However, if you reduced your outreach to 500 emails and got 250 opens, your open rate would be 50%.
It may appear there’s a performance improvement, but in reality, it might not indicate effective scalability.
In order to make our case stronger, let’s take a close look at the analysis based on sequence data of some users. Once again, this follows a unique pattern. With an increase in email volume, open rates are steeply decreasing.
You should always keep an eye on your open rates while increasing your volume. The scalability of cold emails should not be determined solely by open rates; it is crucial to test them gradually at different intervals and carefully evaluate their response and engagement.
Why open rate is not a reliable business metric?
As we discussed, open rates can be often misunderstood and thus can lead to contradictory interpretations.
This section will explore whether high open rates really translate into actual business results.
Furthermore, we’ll discuss other meaningful metrics businesses should consider to assess cold email performance accurately.
#1: Open rates lack accuracy
There are limitations to the accuracy of open rates, which can significantly impact your business results. Here are the technical implications:
Recipients may not have opened your emails
There is a possibility that recipients may not open your emails, despite the open rate indicating otherwise. Email clients can display preview panes or load images automatically, even if the recipient hasn’t actively engaged with the email. Therefore, inflated open rates may create a false impression of engagement and success.
Technical issues with tracking
Open rate accuracy can also be affected by technical problems like image blocking and email clients displaying images automatically. Because of image blocking, tracking pixels, commonly used to measure opens, may not load, resulting in inaccurate or incomplete data. Moreover, when email clients display images automatically, false positives may occur.
Furthermore, advanced spam filters and sorting algorithms may deliver your emails to the recipient but never to the inbox. Your open rates may need to reflect your recipients’ engagement accurately.
Strict policies from ESPs
The reliability of open rates is affected by strict guidelines from Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Google and Apple. In addition, the recent updates indicate that open rates may become even less reliable, particularly concerning GDPR compliance, due to technical problems track opens. As a result of these developments, measuring open rates for cold email campaigns has become more complex.
Inaccurate open rate data can negatively impact your business outcomes. As a result, you may lose opportunities, and business outcomes could be more reliable.
#2: Business is partially affected by open rates
An open rate may not be a reliable way to measure the success of a cold email campaign. Even though they can help you determine how engaged your recipients are with your emails, they may not directly correlate with actual business outcomes.
Let’s take a closer look at the data again. After analyzing and comparing the sequence data of two users for four weeks, we determined that open rates were almost the same, but reply rates hugely varied.
The final conclusion showed that although the open rates were almost the same, the user with a high reply rate closed more revenue. Hence, it would be safe to consider that open rates cannot be used as a strong indicator of business impact.
It’s crucial to look beyond open rates to get a comprehensive assessment of your cold email lead generation success.
Measure what matters to your business
In cold emailing, the primary goal is to generate business, not just to have a high open rate. In the earlier two sections, we discussed that a high open rate doesn’t necessarily mean that your cold email campaign is generating business.
Instead, focusing on metrics reflecting engagement and business outcomes is essential.
What are those metrics?
1. Reply rate
The reply rate is the most important metric. Your reply rate indicates how many recipients responded to your email, indicating genuine engagement. We have already discussed above that open rates can be inaccurate, as shown by the graph comparing open and reply rates.
The open rate may be high, but the reply rate may be low, indicating that recipients may open your emails but have yet to respond.
Reply rate = (number of responses received / number of emails opened) x 100
If you’re suffering from low reply rates, you can go through this blog.
2. Positive reply rate
Your cold email campaign should be evaluated based on metrics that reflect engagement and business outcomes.
A positive reply rate is a valuable metric. In this metric, you measure the number of prospects that respond to your emails and express genuine interest in learning more about your business. Getting a positive reply indicates that your content resonated well with the prospects.
You can track the positive reply rate to determine how effective your cold email campaign is at building meaningful engagements with prospects. You are more likely to convert prospects into customers if your emails have a high positive reply rate.
In contrast, a low positive response rate may indicate that your message or targeting needs improvement so that you can make data-driven adjustments.
3. Qualified meeting rate
Meeting bookings are another important metric. Cold email campaigns that generate meeting bookings indicate that your emails generate interest and sales intent in your prospects. Using this metric, you can determine how effectively your cold email campaign generates tangible business results.
4. Revenue generated
In the end, you should always measure how much business you generated from your cold email campaign. An accurate measure of the success of your campaign is how much revenue it generated.
Moreover, the quality of revenue generated is more important than the quantity. Analyzing the lifetime value of customers acquired through a campaign and their chances of becoming repeat customers or referring others can provide a complete picture of the campaign’s success.
Apart from revenue, you can also consider how long you retain a customer. It is known as Annual Contract Value.
ACV = (Total contract value or ticket size) ÷ (Number of years customer subscribed)
Here’s a recap
To conclude our discussion, let’s sum up the following points:
- Sometimes open rates can lead to significant misconceptions about your leading metrics. These misconceptions hamper optimizations, and your cold emailing suffers from deceptive vanity metrics.
- Open rates may not be reliable business metrics as they can lead to data inaccuracies and technical limitations and don’t give a complete picture of your performance.
- Always rely on and measure the metrics directly impacting your end goals and business. The key metrics are reply rate, interested replies, booking rate, and revenue generated.
Before reading this blog, if you were relying on open rates as your sole success metric, consider rethinking your strategy. Of course, it is important to monitor open rates, but to gauge your overall success without discrepancy, all metrics need to be measured with the right approach.
If you found this blog helpful, let us know how it helped you with cold emailing, we would love to hear from you.
