Over time, email providers like Google, Outlook, and Apple have improved privacy and protections for their customers’ inboxes. These changes have led to greater security for their users but also brought challenges to marketing teams who need to measure their emails’ success. Many Beamery customers are moving away from crowning open rates as reporting royalty in light of Google’s most recent authentication requirements, and favoring, rather, click rates as a measure of success.

Why Do Open Rates Lack Complete Insight?

Frankly, open rates do not equal engagement with your brand’s content. In fact, they don’t necessarily mean the recipient has even opened your email at all. Emails qualify as opened if the recipient’s email client loads a tracking pixel embedded in the email. For an added measure of security, many email providers don’t load images automatically any more. So a recipient may open and even read your message without ever being counted in your open rates. Alternatively, some email clients preload images, including your tracking pixel, to improve user experience and decrease an email’s load time. So some emails may wind up in your open count, skewing your numbers yet again.

How Can You Confidently Measure an Email’s Success?

While there are many places to find resources on creating the ideal email campaign, the main thing to note is that clicks and conversions reign supreme.

Click Through Rates

A more reliable indicator of your email’s success, clicks measure how many recipients clicked one of your message’s calls to action (CTAs).

• Whenever possible, always include a CTA in your email. A good email is compelling, but brief, so often a good CTA invites the reader to ‘click here to read more’, for example.
• Split your segments and better understand your audience with A/B testing.
• Always ensure your target audience is receiving content relevant to their interests and who have explicitly opted in to your content within the past 12 months. These older contacts account for most spam complaints.

Conversion Rates

Of course a great way to measure a campaign’s success is conversion rates. This is the number of recipients who have received, opened, clicked and followed through on an action like completing a Flow, registering for an event or applying for a role.

• Include event registration links when available or links to book an appointment.
• Use multi-page flows to increase conversion rates.

Email Deliverability

Above all else, insuring your emails are successfully being delivered to an inbox, rather than being filtered to another category or blocked altogether, is a true measure of success.

• Send smaller campaigns and gradually increase recipients, especially with new domains.
• Stay away from common spam triggers.
  • Consistent sender address
  • Spam subject lines like "$$$" or "Serious Cash!". See a full list compiled by Hubspot here.
• Build Recipes in Beamery to create relevant segments and remove contacts from your segments who have not recently opted in.
• Use a trusted external tool to test your sender reputation and email deliverability.

Redefining a successful email campaign begins with understanding more about the systems that handle email security and privacy. Stay up to date with industry changes and reach out to your Beamery CRM for specific questions and assistance with building a trusted email strategy.