Why Open Rates Don’t Matter

It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy and today I want to talk about why open rates don’t matter. This is one of those interesting things that it’s kind of like a misconception about email marketing. Open rates are a vanity metric. Now what that means is a lot of people when they first get into email marketing, they get told that open rates are important, that clicks are important, these kind of things. Open rates aren’t important and here’s why. You could be giving away some great content, really valuable stuff or using things like open loops that get people to open every single email you send. You’re going to have a really high open rate, but you could be very bad at number one is pitching or number two at serving what the market wants when it comes time to make a purchase.

You can be having some great information, but no one actually wants to buy a products because you don’t know how to position it, you don’t know how to pitch, you don’t know how to write about it in the right way. What you’re going to find is your open rates might be high and you can go and take screen shots of your Aweber account and certainly this is what gurus will do sometimes. You can take screen shots of your a web account and go, “Wow, look at this open rate, 70%, 80%.” I’ve seen this. I’ve seen this in my own emails. I’ve seen this in other people. It does not matter unless you’re in a competition to see who can get the best open rate.

What matters to us as business people, as entrepreneurs is: Are you making money? Are you generating sales? Are you making a profit? At the end of the day, the most important metric when it comes to your email marketing, it’s not open rates, it’s not clicks. These are measures of engagement. The best metric is your sales. It’s not even your conversion rate. It’s going to be your sales. You might have a low open rate. You might be down to 5%, but you could be making an absolute ton of money. I’ve heard of people doing $10 million plus and email marketing is one of the main sales drivers in their business, yet their average open rate is 5-10%.

The size of your business or the amount you make from your emails is not directly related to your open rate. Your open rate could be high, it could be low. It’s not what you should be focusing on. You should be focusing on and that’s a real question: If you’re not focusing on open rates and clicks, what should you be focusing on? You should be focusing on … Understanding your market is number one. Understand exactly what they want, the deepest problems in there. What keeps them up at night? What makes the upset? What do they get excited at? All these different things. You got to understand your prospect better than he understands himself or herself.

Then you will need to know how to translate that into a pitch. You need to know how to tell a story and good speakers, good presenters do this all the time. Guys like Jesus or we hear about them in the Bible, religious teachers, they tell stories and then they have a moral of the story and you can do this. You get the moral of the stories to buy your product. These are things you should be focusing on is understanding your market and pitching in the right way. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy and I’ll see you next time.