Email Tracking: 3 Common Misconceptions

Email Tracking: 3 Common Misconceptions
By Julia Gulevich

Accurate and detailed statistics on email campaign performance is one of the advantages of email marketing. However, there are several misconceptions concerning email tracking that pervade the industry. It's important that email marketers understand their email statistics properly before making key decisions or evaluating their email campaign's performance.

To help you navigate in the dark waters of email metrics, I'd like to explore 3 of the most common misconceptions in interpretation email tracking results:



1. Email with higher open and click-through rates wins

Email marketers often use a technique that implies segmenting the email list and sending different versions of the same email to each segment. Such split tests help compare the effectiveness of different subject lines, creative approaches, offers, etc. During the next campaign marketers often send the version that had either the highest open or click-through rate (or both) believing that this version is more effective. However, the true is that the email that resulted in a higher open or click-through rate may not be the version that produces the best results. In some cases the email with a lower click-through rate can lead to a higher number of transactions because it was of greater interest but to fewer people.

Well, how can you be sure that your statistics aren't misleading you? In addition to measuring open and click-through rates, it is important that you track how many people performed the actual actions on your website: subscribed to a newsletter, downloaded a free trial, or made a purchase. You can track these transactions by using website tracking, which implies inserting a special code on each web page you want to track.

2. All subscribers opened my email

Open rates are tracked with the use of a transparent one pixel gif image hosted on a server and inserted into a HTML message just like usual images. Any action on the recipients' part that leads to the image load is counted as an open. But this metric may not be accurate if:

the recipient prefers receiving plain text messages;
the recipient open a HTML email in a non-HTML compatible email client;
the recipient's email client doesn't load the images by default;
the recipient opens the email offline after download.
As a result all the above "email opens" will not be counted in the stats.


The open rate is generally defined as "percentage of unique email opens from the total of emails delivered". People can open the same email several times, and some companies measure open rates based on total opens rather than unique opens that results in overstated open rates. Some marketers equate the "email opens" to the "email reads" that may not be true at all.

It is important that you clearly define how you will measure the email open rate for your company, and then consistently work at improving it (from 40% to 50%, for example) without paying attention to someone else's 80%.

3. Email is more responsive than postal mail

In postal mail, the response rate is the percent of people who responded by calling, registering on a website, visiting a store, etc.

In email marketing, the metric "conversion rate" is generally used as the "response" rate. The conversion rate is defined as actions taken as a percentage of unique click-throughs. For a commercial message, an email campaign with the conversion rate 0.25% - 0.50% is rather good. So, actually the email "response" rates often may not be higher than postal mail. But because creating and distributing email messages cost significantly cheaper, email marketing generally brings a much higher return on investment. However, it's the combination of both postal and email marketing that produces the best results.

As an email marketer, avoid measuring your email campaign performance against the "industry average" and try to make critical campaign decisions based on facts, not assumptions.
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