Open Rates vs Response rates

I just wanted to share my two cents on email marketing.

I have been designing email marketing campaigns for branding for over a year now. And in my opinion, the most overrated metric to judge the success of your marketing campaign is through open rates.

Now before you start jumping the gun and start calling me a noob, hear me out. You can get anyone to open your email by using a click-baity subject line. But what's the point if they open the email, mark it as spam and move on. That's money and time wasted.

When I first started out, I had an average open rate of 45% but I was really struggling with the response rate. I didn't care much about it at first, because I was happy high open rate. Then I realized that my approach to all this, wrong. I needed to focus on my email copywriting and increase of my follow ups.

My first campaign was a dud, but after that, I really picked by following up on my prospects. My open rates increase and so did my response rate. But best of all I started closing deals and got a lot of mentions.

And I was reaching out to cold prospects. So there was already a high chance of me getting marked spam and getting my IP banned.

The three points that I am trying to make here are:

1. Vet your prospects. (if you are doing cold outreach.
2. Use modifiers like {first name], [Prospect link] [prospect website] etc. You can use buzzstream to do this but you will have to filter the prospect data manually.
3. Open rates are important, but it's not a metric to score your email campaign. Try and get a reply from your prospects. Always leave a line at the end asking them for their opinion or response.

I have added a screenshot of a campaign I ran in 2019. It's an example of how I keep track of my progress.