I noticed a headline last week about Lena Dunham’s email-first media property, Lenny:
70% is insanely impressive, almost suspiciously so, especially when you consider their audience is listed at 500,000 subscribers. For reference, the benchmark for “media and publishing” according to Mailchimp is a 22.15% open rate. Were they saying that 350,000 open every single email?
Of course, it was too good to be true:
She credits Lenny’s content, devoted fan base, attractive subject lines and a well-timed newsletter for a 69.5 percent gross open rate, which counts multiple opens. An unique open rate stat wasn’t immediately made available.
“Gross open rate” is a term I have not come across before. The idea that you would count multiple individual opens defies the very reason for measuring an open rate: to provide a sense of what proportion of your newsletter subscribers are engaged.
Well, I’m proud to say that Informerly has a 132.94% open rate for our weekday email digest, going all the way back to Jan 1st, 2016. Yes, our emails are apparently so good that we’ve achieved the impossible and crossed 100%.
That is ridiculous.
I do believe our email digests are really good, and we’ve worked very hard at it. From Jan 1st to today, the real open rate is 62%. That would be the metric that Lenny calls a “unique open rate”, or any normal person just calls an open rate. It means exactly what it looks like: out of all emails sent, 62% have been opened. That makes me happy, but I recognize, we are a paid-for product, which biases the number higher.
That 133% number is useless. We often send a number of longer articles, which leads to people opening the emails again when they have time to properly read. A quick SQL query shows me that 33.4% of all emails sent were opened more than once. In fact, 54.9% of all emails that were opened at least once, were opened more than once. If you want to think about multiple opens, those are the numbers Lenny should be looking at.
In fact, one email was opened 208 times, which significantly helps our gross open rate become that much more gross. It turned out it had been forwarded across an entire company. Luckily we noticed this anomalous data point, got in touch with the original subscriber, and it led to our largest enterprise deal to date! However, I would never pretend it should be counted towards our open rate.
We understand the current new media climate celebrates and salivates over vanity metrics. Everyone wants billions of video views, millions of email subscribers, and hours of time spent on page. But there are vanity metrics, and then there are just made up numbers. If you’re being sold a metric that defies the basic logic of why it’s being calculated, raise that red flag at once.
Note: it was brought to my attention that even the esteemed New York Times engages in Gross Open Rates (and apparently 70% seems to be the consistent magic gross number).