Understanding Campaign Goals: Focus on Conversions Over Open Rates (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: The most important item is understanding your goal. Are you doing this campaign? Are you sending this email to get clicks for people to read information about your issue? Or are you trying to get petition signups? Are you trying to get new newsletter signups? Are you trying to raise more money? And I think for many of us, raising money, engaging people to volunteer or come out or contact Congress, those are the goals. And really focusing on conversions is the most important thing for your campaign. That's really the goal for your campaign. Now, we have open rate and Apple has made open rate less reliable with their Apple Mail Protection Program. So we're seeing an inflation there that's artificial. It is now harder to understand who's actually opening your email. So over here at EveryAction, we've decided to create a second metric called machine opens and we're segmenting out any of the machine opens into that metric. Now, open rate is more reliable, but it is going to be lower than you are used to. But it is still reliable. So if you're doing an A-B test on subject lines and you're looking to see which one is increasing your open rate, the open rate can now tell you, hey, these are who we consider actual people opening your emails. And you need to supplement that with other metrics. You really need to be looking at your click rate and you really need to be looking at your conversion rate because that's, again, the real goals of any campaign. The open rate is nice because it's loud and it's early and it's really good for testing subject lines. But it's going to be those conversions that's important to you. So really looking at those metrics and looking at the people who click more than open, maybe open up your click segment to be nine months if it's shorter than that. But really that's where the important part is going to be is looking at these other metrics and understanding what open rate can tell you and what it cannot tell you. And we feel that by segmenting out machine opens, that is data that is interesting for your program, but you're really going to want to continue looking at that open rate and looking at clicks and looking at conversions.