The open rate has been a great quantifiable metric for email campaigns for decades. Primarily because it was easy to track and indicated the exposure. As we know, B2B demand generation campaigns target broad audiences, and considerable exposure is their first priority.
However, things drastically change when you need to segment the broad audience, identify the high-value prospects, and prioritize them for nurturing. You need solid engagement data to fine-tune your inbound tactics. At this moment, you cannot rely on open rates at all, and there are reasons for that.
Why Do Open Rates Not Reflect Engagement?
There are a couple of life observations that shake marketers’ confidence about open rates as proof of engagement:
- Addresses often glance at preview panes without bothering themselves to open an email. Conversely, personalized subject lines and preview texts can prompt users that email content is worth their time.
- Some spam filters might open newsletters automatically and click through the attached links.
- We can’t tell for sure whether the opened email was read and how the email copy resonated with the audience.
- The imperfect tracking of email traffic won’t let you attribute the email audience to the revenue, e.g., open rates won’t correlate with revenue gains, either.
All in all, the open rate can’t provide a strong and clear signal of how many people truly engaged with your messages and whether your campaign accomplished its goals.
The Challenges of a Privacy-Centered Future
Besides the hindrances mentioned above, we witness data privacy regulations going wild on third-party tracking pixels and other measurement techniques. For instance, the iOS 15 privacy policy has simply cut off marketers from tracking open rates.
Given that about 50% of emails are viewed on mobile devices, the senders are literally left with the chunks. Unfortunately, iOS open rates may now rest in our memory.
5 Reliable Engagement Metrics to Gauge
To reveal customers’ engagement as it is, we suggest you shift focus to meaningful email metrics. There are 5 of them that uncover how effectively your email messages nudge email recipients to embark on their buyer journey.
1. The Time Spent Reading
Tracking the actual time one spends reading your newsletters can signify whether you need to work on the readability and design of your messages. Also, a short timespan can indicate that even though the subscriber was captivated by the preview pane, the email copy didn’t hold their attention for long.
As you can see, reading time can complement the open rate and inform you what aspects of email communication need improvement.
2. Email Campaign CTR
Click-throughs prove that your CTA hit the recipient’s intent directly. It’s solid proof that you’ve targeted the right people and made your CTA text compelling.
However, determining which CTA works best for your lead-generating purpose always takes some testing and assessment. But it’s definitely worth it as you get solid proof of interest instead of a vague indication of engagement. With CTRs, you get the baseline for tracking the on-site engagement and attributing leads to your email campaign.
3. Qualitative Surveys
Email surveys allow you to directly ask subscribers which pieces of email content they found most appealing and which ones made them roll their eyes. With these qualitative data, you will know exactly what general UX weak spots are in your design or what text content, CTAs, and subject lines to improve.
4. Subscriber Retention
Most B2B businesses have adopted the new reality where long-term customer relationships drive the most impressive growth. And so should you. Subscriber retention is one of the biggest contributors to lasting and fruitful relationships. So start tracking the number of constant subscribers that stay with you for a long time and compare it to those unsubscribing.
This subscriber retention rate provides you a bigger picture of how you succeed in providing ongoing value and strong subscriber satisfaction.
Audience data enrichment can help with that. For instance, you can leverage Primer ABM targeting functionality as it helps you build custom audiences or enrich your CRM targeted lists with intent, firmografic, and technographic data points. Those will add granular precision to your targeting and help you build hyper-personalized 1:1 emails that will drive site visits and conversions.
5. Goal Completion
Finally, we recommend you scrutinize goal completion. Email campaign goals should be aligned with those of corresponding sales funnel stages. So, you should put aside vague metrics and check whether the end goals are accomplished through your efforts.
Do your subscribers complete the target action? If you promote the webinar, how many subscribers fill out the registration form?
As you can see, there are a lot of metrics directly depending on the email subscribers’ engagement. Moreover, they are way more representative and conclusive than email open rates; thus, they are worth considering foremost.