Many coaches that use a software program to email blast recruits or market their camps love being able to see who actually opened their messages.  Although this is a nice statistic to have, understanding what it really means (and what it doesn’t) is important.

This article from about.com, How To Interpret Email Newsletter Open Rates, explains that because so many people have so many different ways of checking email, it’s impossible to track opens with 100% certainty.

Let me explain …

Without getting too technical, you’ll never get a false open (if a tracking program says a reader opened the email, then he/she opened it), but there may be people who did read the email who won’t show up as having opened it because of “how” they opened it.  The take-away is that you shouldn’t write off a recruit or the success of an email blast if you don’t get the exact open rate you wanted.

However, one stat that is 100% reliable, is the “click through rate.”  The click through rate tells you how many recipients clicked on a link placed in the body of an email.

So what should you do about it?

1. For one, it’s always good practice to put in a couple of conspicuously placed links in your email messages since they are much more accurate in gauging a recruit’s interest.
2. Second, although opens aren’t completely reliable, they can be used as a relative measure, for example to compare the performances of emails sent to similar recipient groups, but at different times or with different subject headers.

Having software that can “track” opens and “click throughs” is an advantage, knowing how to interpret the tracking is a competitive edge.

ARMS has many features that make your email response statistics more meaningful and accessible – thus a competitive edge.  To find out more and watch a demo, signup here.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.