Are Open Rates Useless?

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. Today we’re diving into a topic that has been stirring up some controversy lately. You may have heard the rumors that open rates don’t matter anymore. Everyone is like Apple is giving you fake open rates, your open rates don’t mean anything. It’s all about cliques and this and that what is always thought is never that black and white in the world of email marketing. If you have agile thinking, which is something you should always strive to have, then you should always adapt and use any piece of data you have to improve your business. Open rates may be not as accurate as they used to be, but they are still a valuable metric that you can rely on to improve some aspects of your business. So in this episode, I’m going to show you how I analyze my open rates, what I look at, and how I use this data to adjust and improve. But before we jump in, we have to do the usual mention of Igor 2.0, my digital doppelganger that’s recording this intro for you. We still haven’t completely decided whether we should keep it in the team or go back to my natural voice that you all love so much. I’d love to know what you think. So if you haven’t already, please head on over to Igor dot top slash voice and let me know. All right, let’s get started.

01:08

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process. This podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

01:53

Open Rate today is a lot trickier to track than it used to be. There’s a lot of fake opens, especially if you’ve got lots of Apple devices, or people checking their email from Apple devices. Because they show you false opens like every email will show up as opened. I don’t I don’t discard open rates completely. I’ve never really based my business on open rates. But I’ve also never discarded them completely because it still tells me whether a subject line is good. It still tells me whether a list is of good quality. And it still tells me whether there’s any kind of interest with that particular angle. Because remember, one of the easiest ways to test angles or different directions you can go within your copy is your subject lines. As you know my book, list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire, Confessions of an email millionaire wasn’t a winning subject line. So it’s a tool for you to test things out and to see what’s generating a better response. Now, at this point in my life, I will probably only look at the open rate for that. I will also look at the open rates for the sake of maybe trying to understand whether melee at a certain time of day is more effective than in another time of day. And actually last year, I switched to when I was my mail out time because of that, because I’ve seen a drop in open rates and I knew my delivery rates were, you know, we’re okay. So I changed my mind. Right? So I didn’t change it when I sent it out. And that seemed to have a positive effect. But yeah, I guess largely I agree. I agree that open rates largely don’t matter. And you know what, we can even take that argument to the next step to the next level and say that clicks don’t matter, either. Because what if you generated lots of clicks, but he didn’t make tons of sales? What do you see, that’s an argument you can make for anything? You know, you can say, well do webinars attendee matter? I say they do. But I also had webinars where somebody brought 250 people on the webinar, and we only closed maybe 1% Instead of the usual 10. Well, do attendees not matter? Well, in this case, they don’t, because sales showed me that they don’t. But in general, would I judge the success of my campaign as one of the factors to be attended? Yes, absolutely. To the same extent, if I did a webinar, the attendance was lower than usual, but I still made the sales, the conversions, etc. I would not like to say that attendance doesn’t matter. I would just say that that particular angle for that particular webinar or that particular audience, the it didn’t seem like people wanted to attend the webinar, or maybe their interest wasn’t there, but the ones who did attend, converted, which means we do have a good webinar content, but maybe we should work on a different angle. Right? Again, you have to be very agile in your thinking. You can’t just say this matters or this doesn’t matter. Openings matter, clicks matter. Sales matters don’t matter. It can be as one sided as that. Although you do hear a lot of people say that it is specifically about open rates. You know, I was speaking to a buddy of mine, Matthew, who works with some of the bigger publishers in the info space. And I told them, hey, we’re getting to know this much openly, right? And he’s like, well, yeah, but you know, open regional matters anymore. I see why it was like, well, because you got fake opens, you got this and blah, blah, blah. And it’s all about the clicks and talking about the sales. Yeah. On one hand, you’re right. On the other hand, if I’m mailing out a subject line, and I’m getting a crappy open rate, it tells me something, it gives me something. It’s an information piece I can then use to make a decision, whether it’s a creative decision, or a technical decision. What if I mailed something at half of my usual open rate? That means I triggered something, either I’m not hitting the right angle, maybe my email delivery went down, right? Maybe, maybe open rate is a good indication whether or not you get delivered. So not black and white, but largely Yeah, I’d say that it’s not the end of the world. As far as the open rates go, it’s not like if I get high open rates, I’m going to make a lot of money and if I don’t get high open rates I don’t. That’s not really true.

06:24

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com. Now to claim your free package.