Jimmy Kim argues that open rate is a misleading metric because the absolute number is inflated and meaningless on its own. Instead, focus on revenue per recipient or click-to-conversion rates, where open rate matters only as a preliminary signal, not the end goal.
Open rates aren't completely useless. They are directionally useful for comparison within your own list. So what I mean by this is if campaign A gets a 30% open rate, campaign B gets, let's say, a 20% open rate, and it's sent to similar segments at similar times, that's still an important signal, even if the absolute numbers do have some inflation. So relative is okay, but the absolute number itself really is meaningless. So stop reporting we hit a 32% open rate as a win. It doesn't mean what your CFO thinks it actually means.
And to add a deeper point to that, let's just keep it real simple. If you're optimizing for an open rate as a primary KPI, you're optimizing for a number that is mostly, well, noise ultimately.
Exactly. Where instead you need to optimize for revenue per recipient or click-to-conversion, where open rate is kind of the glance, not the end-all be-all goal.
