By making certain adjustments its easy to get whatever open and click-through rates you like but that wont necessarily deliver the best results for your business Dean Maidment has some tips for better assessing your email marketing performance This article was developed by Taguchi to let readers know about its free guide Expert Walkthrough Marketing Automation Made Simple Open and click-through rates easy to measure and easy to understand An increase is good a decrease is bad right Well sort of If they are trending down surely that must be bad thing Maybe but to be honest there is no simple answer to this question Our platform sends millions upon millions of emails per month across a range of clients and industries so here is a simple example from one month to illustrate how complex it can be to analyse performance based on open and click-through rates Across retail communications the average open rate for marketing email activity was 2096 and the average click-through was 250 In the travel transportation and hospitality industry the rates averaged 2069 and 217 respectively Observation Theyre pretty similar with retail sector having slightly higher rates Does that mean retail emails are doing better than travel and hospitality Answer No idea theyre just rates and they dont tell you anything about sales customer retention acquisition costs reach or even overall engagement Would comparing like-for-like industries provide better insight Answer Probably not They are still just rates and they still tell you very little Open and click-through rates tend to be scrutinised when they are lower than expected the assumption being that there is a problem Was it the copy the deliverability or some other issue that needs to be fixed The truth is open and click-through rates are heavily influenced by a multitude of interrelated factors These include things like your customer acquisition and contact strategy your database size hygiene and list residence the length of time subscribers have been in your database By adjusting your segmentation strategy and boosting frequency of communication with your best subscribers its easy to reach whatever open and click-through rate numbers you like However this may not deliver the best outcome for your business Therefore instead of measuring performance solely on open and click rates I always emphasise the importance of understanding and measuring conversion email ROI and overall engagement as your primary metrics If you want to pick a single metric to determine the health of your email strategy its conversion If you see a drop there you should work backwards through your other metrics to find a reason and determine how the other levers can be adjusted to increase conversion Focusing on conversion better aligns your email or marketing automation strategy with your organisations KPIs such as sales performance and ensures that when trade-offs are to be made they benefit the business For example an increase in email frequency leads to reduced open and click-through rates but still produces a very positive result overall Despite the declining rates per email you could be driving more conversions Conversely relying solely on trends in open and click-through rates may lead you to reduce your email volume and thereby reduce conversions To understand this relationship you really need to delve into the details of your program to work out the point at which sending more email means a negative ROI Other useful metrics aside from open and click-through rates you may want to track in assessing your email marketing performance include Engagement performance predicted future conversion trend and customer lifetime value If these are trending up then overall the impact will be positive and you will likely be generating more revenue and driving more engagement through your increased contact frequency even if your open and click-through rates per email have declined However continuing with this strategy means you may need to accept lower open rates and possibly even lower conversion value per email As every companys circumstances are different there is no one true combination of factors that will ensure maximum performance of your campaigns Therefore best practice is to test changes to various components to see what works for you Two simple ways to start to improve performance are Adjust your segmentation approach to target the most engaged subscribers as measured by historical engagement more frequently than those that are less engaged and when you do send to less-engaged subscribers try varying the message from what youre sending to the more-engaged subscribers Set frequency caps to limit your subscribers to receiving a set number of broadcast emails per week based on their engagement levels which will help increase the open rates of each of those emails Then tune the frequency cap up or down to find the level that maximises customer lifetime value taking into account the impact on conversion and unsubscribe rates The potential trade-off between email frequency and open and click-through rates should be analysed and factored into your email or marketing automation strategy The balance will be different for every business and may change over time Therefore while we cant tell you exactly what trade-off is right for you we can certainly assist with tactical advice to help you manage this process in line with your business objectives All sounding too complex Thats probably why so many people just look at open and click-through rates However its not really that difficult once you know what youre looking for So where do you start Firstly move to measuring conversion and work your way from there Dean Maidment is managing director at TaguchiMarketing For more tips on how to better implement email marketing and automation programs check out Taguchis Expert Walkthrough