It’s probably no surprise to hear that I spend a lot of time looking at email statistics.
Something occurred to me very recently. While we focus so much on open rates and click rates, there are other statistics that matter just as much, if not more.
What other statistics are important to you when you look at your email performance?
I’ll list a few here – some of these are worthy of their own article in the future:
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Open to click ratio
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Spam complaint rate
- Number of new subscribers
There are probably several others that I could mention as well.
But I wonder when the last time was that you looked specifically at the number of people who didn’t open your emails?
Think about it for a second.
If you’ve read some of my other blog posts, you’ll remember that I talk a lot about engagement, and how you can hurt your sending reputation if you send lots of emails to people who regularly don’t open them. The more you do this, the more likely it is that your sending reputation is going to take a hit, and if this happens, it’s only a matter of time before the emails you’re sending all end up in the spam folder.
So, keeping an eye on the people who don’t open your emails suddenly becomes very important.
Why aren’t they opening your emails? Is it because they’re busy today and didn’t see it? Is it because they’ve lost interest and have stopped opening anything from you? Or is it because they’ve never opened anything, ever?
If a large proportion of your audience isn’t opening your emails on a regular basis, you need to find those people and stop sending them emails. This is often harder than you might realise, because not all email marketing platforms make it that easy to find your unengaged contacts.
And even if you’re able to search for people who haven’t opened anything in, say, the last 90 days, you need to be very careful! As you’ll often find that a search like that will also turn up people who’ve only just signed up to your mailing list and not opened anything as yet. And you certainly don’t want to be removing newly-added contacts from your list after a week or two.
So make sure that you’re identifying newly added contacts and exclude them from any searches that you do for unengaged contacts.
You can also get an idea of the number of people who haven’t opened anything recently by running my free Email Health Check – this tells you, quickly and easily, just how well you’re managing your engagement and how many people haven’t opened your emails in the last 30 and 90 days.
If you want to go one step further and automatically tag your contacts that haven’t engaged in the last 30, 60, 90 days or beyond, check out Deliverability Defender that can do just that… and much more.
