Comments on: Understand the Statistics You Use

By: Don’t Fire Those Non-Responders!

Don’t Fire Those Non-Responders! — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:33:00 +0000

[...] a comment on this post I said that email click-thru ratesare misleading. Here’s further proof from MarketingSherpa [...]

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:56:01 +0000

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.

By: David M. Patt, CAE

David M. Patt, CAE — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:46:34 +0000

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.

By: Lisa Junker

Lisa Junker — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:22:14 +0000

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 …

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:01:05 +0000

Oh, also — unsubscribe rate. Definitely keep an eye on that.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:59:36 +0000

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

By: Lisa Junker

Lisa Junker — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:32:13 +0000

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?