Open Rates Are Dead – Why It’s Time to Move On

To promote deeper engagement with members, many credit unions turn to email marketing. With the overall aim of building trust and a sense of community that leads to increased sales and retention, this strategy’s effectiveness is characterized by:

Personalized Communications

Personalization can take various forms, the most common of which are inserting member names, referencing their actual accounts, and noting specific transaction behavior. This creates a sense of affinity between the members and the credit union.

Address Various Member Groups

Emails can be differentiated by member attributes such as demographics, account types, and length of tenure. This allows content to be better tailored to specific member interests.

Valuable Information

Better knowledge of members’ interests and situations can help ensure the right information gets to the right people. This keeps members updated on new services, special offers, and promotions.

Direct Attention to Other Resources

Targeted emails can raise awareness of online resources like Niche Experiences, educational webinars, podcasts, and community events.

Feedback Channel

A best practice in email marketing is to encourage member feedback. Whether it is a “Tell Us How We’re Doing” link at the bottom of every email or directly soliciting feedback via a survey or feedback form, members feel they have a voice in the credit union relationship.

Measuring Results

Successful email marketing programs depend on careful analysis of performance metrics to reach engagement goals. A credit union may be tempted to focus on the open rate as the best measure of engagement, assuming that a member opening an email must be more engaged. However, simply opening an email cannot be considered an attribute of engagement since so many behavioral and technical variables are in play.

How Open Rate is Determined

Determining an open rate is achieved by embedding a unique, invisible tracking pixel in the email's HTML code. When the recipient opens the email, a request is sent to the server to download this image, and the request is recorded. If the recipient opens the email again, the request is recorded again. Hence, the tracking pixel informs the sender about the number of times the email is opened, thereby allowing the measurement of both unique and total opens.

Open Rate ≠ Engagement

While email marketers need to know the open rate, using it alone is not practical due to its limitations. Firstly, the concept of open rates does not accurately reflect engagement:

• Lack of Content Interaction: Just because a member opens an email doesn’t mean they actually read or interacted with the content. They might open it out of curiosity or habit but not take any further action, which means the open doesn’t translate to meaningful engagement.
• Irrelevant Content: If the content of the email isn’t relevant or valuable to the recipient, they may open it but quickly disregard it. This disconnect between opening an email and engaging with its content means that open rates can’t fully capture the member’s interest or satisfaction.
• Email Skimming: Many members quickly skim emails for relevant information. If they don’t find anything immediately interesting, they may not engage further. Open rates register the email as opened, but this doesn’t mean the content was effectively communicated or absorbed.

• Routine Checking: Some members might routinely open emails just to clear out their inbox or mark them as read, without any intention of engaging with the content. This habit inflates open rates without indicating real interest or action.

• Subject Line Influence: A catchy or intriguing subject line might lead to a high open rate, but if the content doesn’t match the promise of the subject line, members may quickly disengage. This creates a disconnect between the open rate and actual engagement with the content.

Open Rate: Technical Issues

Even if the open rate could imply member engagement, the metric suffers from significant technical liabilities:

• Pixel Blockers—Many email clients, such as Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook, now block tracking pixels to protect user privacy. So, when the recipient opens an email, no tracking pixel is present to measure that occurrence. As a result, the open rate might be significantly underreported, giving a false sense of low engagement.
• Security Filters—Inbound emails are routinely scanned for malicious content. Software that opens emails without human intervention distorts the open rate metric. Also, emails may be tagged as spam before they reach the inbox. These automated opens are counted as genuine interactions, inflating the open rate without any real member engagement.
• Forwarded Email—If an email is forwarded and opened by another person, the tracking pixel still reports the opening by the original recipient. This distorts the data, as the open rate no longer reflects the engagement of the actual target audience.
• Image Blocking—Some users have their email settings configured to block images from loading automatically. Since open rates are often tracked by a hidden image pixel, these opens won't be recorded if images are not displayed. This can lead to a significant underreporting of actual opens, skewing the data and making it less reliable.
• Previews can trigger a tracking pixel—Recipients often preview emails before deciding whether to read them. Preview functionality in some email browsers triggers a tracking pixel, even if the email is read partially or not at all, falsely inflating the open rate even if the member didn’t fully engage with the content.
• Inconsistent Reporting Standards—Different email service providers (ESPs) may have varying ways of calculating and reporting open rates, especially when factoring in unique vs. total opens. This inconsistency can make it difficult to compare open rates across campaigns or ESPs accurately.

An email marketing campaign can be an effective component of the overall strategy to increase member engagement. However, using the right metrics to measure results is essential to constantly sharpen the ongoing efficacy of such efforts.

In part 2, we’ll discuss the metrics you need to pay attention to in order to best measure and improve digital member engagement at your credit union. Click here to subscribe so you don’t miss it!