Email Marketing: Open Rates vs Click Through Rates
Channel: SmartBox Dental
Date: 2011-06-25

http://www.smartboxweb.com

A lot of people get confused when we say only 10 or 15% of people on your email list are opening your emails. That number's kind of misconstrued; what happens is because of different email programs, the Gmails and the Outlooks and the Yahoos and the AOLs and the complete suite of everything out there that's available, different email programs are going to respond to read receipts, to show that an email has been read, differently. What you are going to run into is obviously a 10 or 15% open rate that the email's been read, but that's typically not anywhere close to being the actual percentage. What we find is an average of 10 or 15% and from the other metrics that we can measure by, typically we find somewhere between 50-70% of your prospects are actually opening and reading that email but we're only able to confirm 10 or 15% just because of the variances on all the different systems that are out there. 

The other metric is click through rates which is the number of clicks that an email may get, so you put a link to your website from your email and you measure how many people click from your email to your website. For instance, a statistic on an email that we just sent out just a few minutes ago: we had an email blast go out to about 900 people, a subset of a list of ours, and within five minutes I looked at the numbers on them. We had 11 opens reported within the first five minutes, however also within the first five minutes 27 people had clicked on the link in the email to come to our website so that gives you kind of an idea how skewed the reported numbers can be. Obviously there had to be at least 27 people that read it or they couldn't have clicked on the link, and the software only says that 11 people opened and read the email. Hopefully that helps to clear a few things up.