David — I hope you (and the associations you mention) realize that email open rates are meaningless.
Understand the Statistics You Use
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Hi Kevin! I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this. While I don’t think any one statistic tells the entire story, I’ve found it helpful to know if a good chunk of members are or are not reading e-mails from my association, or if the open rate is trending up or down (I know at my last job we saw a consistent trend downward, combined with a consistent increase in the number of opt-outs, and it pushed us to make big changes in how we handled e-mail to our members). Do you think open rates have any utility at all?
Lisa, open rates have some utility in measuring trends — but only to a limited extent. Your prior organization could have been seeing fewer real “opens” but it also could have been seeing more people reading emails in such a way that the open could not be measured in the traditional way. It is a mistake to look at the “open” rate of an email stat and say “XX% of people read my newsletter.” Far better stats include, in my opinion:
– Sales per email (the best, if you sell things and have a system in place to track)
– Click-thru rates (still a little misleading, but a better measurement than open)
– Individual responses, if you include frequent questions or mechanisms for feedback from your readers
Oh, also — unsubscribe rate. Definitely keep an eye on that.
That clarifies things a lot–thank you! I’ve definitely seen people confuse “open rates” and “reading rates” before. Clickthroughs are definitely a helpful way to distinguish between “opened in Outlook’s preview window but deleted without actually reading” and “actually reading long enough to click through.”
Another option I’ve seen used, at least for electronic periodicals like an e-newsletter, is a readership study, just like you’d do for a print publication. It wouldn’t need to be nearly as elaborate as one you might do for a monthly magazine, but at least it gives you some real data on whether members value your e-newsletter …
Many association execs are suprised by this stat because they think they are communicating with all of their members.
Regardless how you view this, it makes it clear that everybody isn’t going to connect to the association in the same way.
David, you have a valid point. Of course, a large percentage of any association’s members are not going to read its magazine or print newsletter, either (but since there’s no “open” measurement for our magazines, we prefer not to think about it…)
Ultimately, an association has to communicate in a wide variety of ways — online, email, print/mail, etc. Just doing “one” thing and calling it “communications” doesn’t work. Let people communicate with you (and hear from you) in ways that they find comfortable.