Your open rate means nothing

I have a controversial opinion which I’m going to share now. If you have really killer open rates on your email…it means you’re not doing enough to find new people for your list. I’m a little sick of people who taut their high open rate, because they almost always have very few people on their email list.

There are occasionally people who maintain high open rates and add tons of people to their list, but they are few and far between. When I talk to somebody who has 40-60% open rates, I always ask them how many people they have added in the past month.

“3” is what they usually reply.

That’s not very many. I add 1,000 new people a week by comparison. If you never add new people and purge people who don’t open, then you’ll have a killer high open-rate. However, if only 100 people open your emails, that’s not great. My open rates hover right around 20%, but sometimes they go as low as 12% when I’ve just done a big promo and added a ton of people to my list.

The other thing that happens for people with really high opens is that they don’t send out a newsletter nearly enough. The more often you send an email, the lower your open rates tend to be. Usually, when somebody has a 40-60% open rate, they are sending monthly or even quarterly, while best practices say to send an email weekly, which is what I personally do.

I’m going to math now. If you have 1,000 people on your email list, and you send your email monthly, you have reached a potential total of 1,000 people.  With a stellar 60% open rate, you will have 600 people open your email. If you send an email weekly to 1,000 people, with a 20% open rate, then you’ll touch 800 people during that same time.

Yes, there will be some overlap, but overlap is good. Overlap is when you are building trust with people, and even those who don’t open will see it in their inbox. My point is that you should worry less about open rates and more about touchpoints with your audience. You can accomplish this through social media, too, but your mailing list is where you will get the most engagement per action.

That’s not to say that open rates don’t matter, but what matters much more are touchpoints with your audience. The more touchpoints your audience receives from you, the more trust you will build. Just watch out, because you need to develop ways to communicate with your audience where they are receiving NEW information with every email, and you need to watch your unopens or ISPs will start sending you to spam.

But if you become a source of new, valuable information, even joy in their lives, you will do more for your success that maintaining a tiny email list that doesn’t send very often.