Open rates: is a flawed metric better than no metric at all?

Our New Media Releases are designed with the needs of journalists in mind. But our clients are PR professionals and we kind of like to make them happy too! One of the service features our clients appreciate the most is the back-end reporting we provide post send. We tell clients who opened their release, how many times they opened it, what links were most popular, and more. (We also tell them when there are problems so they know who did not get it.) Clients use this information in different ways: some use it for follow up calls, some to reach out to key journalists who did not open their release, some at PR firms use it to show their own clients, some simply to track what does and does not seem to be working so they can adjust accordingly over time.

Open rates, however, are a problematic metric. Senders can only track people who viewed images. As the preview pane becomes increasingly important, more and more people are reading email through their preview pane without bothering to download images. Add these recipients to the large numbers that have images blocked and that is a large portion of the average target list. And handhelds are becoming ubiquitous, especially with the B-to-B crowd (estimates range from 40-60% of B-to-B emails now being opened on handheld devices). And there’s more: although we send multiple versions of each release–including a plain text version for recipients who can’t or prefer not to receive HTML and a handheld friendly version–we cannot read much data on people who opened these plain text versions (although we can see what percentage of the target list fell into this category–nearly always under 10%). In other words, the reporting we provide only really reflects recipients who opened on a desktop and viewed images (an increasingly shrinking universe) or clicked something in the release.

Now for the good news: releases that include substantial links and multi-media elements deliver higher open rates. In other words, if you include background info, images, video and more in your release you are much more likely to engage journalists. Plain releases with simple contact info and a few links are less appealing and return lower open rates (similarly, releases with key links at the bottom so they’re not visible through preview pane are less effective). There are, of course, a few other things that have an impact on open rates also: send time (mid-week late morning is best), subject line (keep it short, honest and to the point), preview pane view (make sure all components are visible even with images blocked), and list (target wisely).

So back to the question. Is a flawed metric better than no metric at all? Traditional wire services will tell you the long list of who they send to but not who actually viewed it (and in nearly 5 years of looking at tracking reports, I have yet to see a General Assignment desk open a release). Is knowing who opened/clicked on your release, even if it is not a comprehensive report, an improvement? Is knowing who your release did not get to also useful? What information would you like to know after you send a release into the world? How would you use that information?

Would love your feedback!

TagsNew Media Release, Open Rates, PWR New Media, Release It