Are you looking at e-mail open rates as a success metric? Well, it’s time to get past that. While this measure does provide some indication of interest in your newsletter, it still doesn’t get the recipient into the sales cycle … and that’s what matters most! Of course, there is still some value to open rate, as it helps gauge interest in your message, but it’s only a first step, and you need to track the entire set of results.

As you can see, there’s a funnel in play, here. For B2B e-mail marketers, 23 percent of recipients (depending on how the metric is defined) open an e-mail, with 11 percent clicking through and 3 percent converting. So, while open rates give you a sense of how successful your newsletter is, you need to manage subsequent milestones, as well.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]