When reviewing the results of a law firm email newsletter or alert campaign, the two key metrics typically examined are the "open rate" and the "clickthrough rate." What are these metrics and how important are they in terms of measuring email campaign performance and subsequent business development?
Open Rate: the "open rate" is a percentage measured as the number of people who actually opened your email divided by the number of people to whom the email was verifiably delivered. For example, if you distributed a law firm email to 1,000 subscribers, and 200 of those emails "bounced" (i.e., were undeliverable due to out of office, on vacation, bad address, etc.), then 800 of your emails would be verifiably delivered. If 200 of those delivered emails were opened, then your open rate is 25% (200/800).
The "open rate" is driven by (i) the name of the individual or company in the "From" line (do recipients recognize the name of the sender? clients will typically recognize the name of their law firm or individual attorney), and (ii) the subject line (is it compelling and interesting enough to persuade people to open the email?) (see our prior post on crafting subject lines that promote higher open rates).
It all sounds simple, but there are two important issues to take into account that make the "open rate" a somewhat less helpful metric than most people think (as far as business development is concerned).
First, the technology that records "opens" relies on a tiny transparent image that is displayed when an email is opened. Whenever this image is displayed, the server where it is hosted records an "open." However, if a recipient who opens your email has "image blocking" turned on initially, then that "open" won't be recorded since the transparent image intended for this purpose is not displayed (at least until the recipient turns "image blocking" off). Since image blocking is probably employed by at least some of your subscribers, the number of actual opens for a particular campaign will always be higher than your software indicates (that is, there will be people who opened your email and read it without displaying the image that would record their open).
By the same token, if you are monitoring trends, you'll probably notice that your open rate has fallen over time. This doesn't necessarily mean fewer and fewer people are opening your emails - instead, it likely means more of your subscribers are using "image blocking" (however, if you notice a drastic change in open rates from one campaign to the next (e.g., more than 5% in less than a month), then that's something to check into).
Second, an "open" will be recorded even if a subscriber passes their cursor over the email and it displays momentarily in their preview pane (in an application such as Outlook). That is because, to capture an open, the transparent image used for that purpose only needs to be displayed for an instant. So when you see that a particular subscriber "opened" an email, it doesn't tell you whether the subscriber spent 2-3 minutes reading it, or a split second passing over it with their cursor. In short, "opens" also capture meaningless activity unrelated to serious interest in your email.
These issues don't mean that "open rates" aren't an important statistic. To the contrary, "open rates" demonstrate how well your subscribers recognize your name and how well you are crafting your subject lines. Nevertheless, one needs to be aware of the technical issues that impact open rates, and the resulting limitations on the utility of open rates as a measure of reader interest in the subject of your email.
From the standpoint of measuring reader interest, a far more helpful metric is the clickthrough rate, which helps distinguish between subscribers who glanced at your email for a second or two, and those subscribers who are seriously interested in the subject of your email.
Clickthrough rate: the "clickthrough rate" is a percentage measured as the number of unique subscribers who clicked one or more links in your email divided by the number of unique people who opened your email (note: many email marketing applications measure the "clickthrough rate" as the number of unique subscribers who clicked one or more links in your email over the number of unique people to whom the email was delivered - this writer takes issue with that measurement since someone can't click a link in your email merely because it was delivered - they first need to open it - so it doesn't make sense to use "emails delivered" as a denominator).
Note: "clickthrough" measurement is NOT affected by "image blocking" since even if someone doesn't display images, their clicks can still be recorded since clicks are measured using a different technology.
By determining what percentage of subscribers who opened your email actually clicked a link, you begin to get a clearer picture of how interested your audience was in the subject of your email. The simple reason is that a subscriber won't click a link to "read more" or "view the full article," unless he or she is interested in learning more about the topic discussed based on the preliminary material included in the email.
Moreover, because email marketing software allows you to identify clicks down to individual subscribers (e.g., [email protected] clicked to read the full tax alert), studying clickthroughs also enables a law firm to pinpoint the interests of individual clients. For example, if [email protected] clicked to read the full tax alert that was the subject of an email, the tax partner who authored the alert may want to touch base with [email protected] to further discuss the issue and see if there is an opportunity for some new business. Or the marketing department will want to include [email protected] on the invitee list to an upcoming seminar on the tax issue that was the subject of the email.
One issue to keep in mind - if you send an email alert on a "niche" topic (e.g., new IRS ruling) to a broad audience (e.g., all of the law firm's corporate clients), then the clickthrough rate will certainly be lower than if the alert was targeted at a "niche" audience (e.g., solely the firm's tax clients). So the makeup of your distribution lists is certainly something to keep in mind when comparing clickthrough rates across multiple campaigns.
In any event, because clickthrough rates provide a clear picture of your audience's interest level in the topics of your email alerts, and individual clickthroughs demonstrate interest of specific individuals in your content, it is helpful to write email copy that promotes clickthroughs. This means copy that is "teaser" in nature - i.e., copy that entices readers to want to click through to read more. In this way, you can isolate the readers who are truly interested in your topic (see also our prior post on hyperlink copy that promotes clickthroughs)
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