Jimmy Kim argues email open rates are a weak engagement signal and marketers should focus on purchases and conversions instead. Watch spam complaint rates above 0.1-0.2% as a red flag, and move unresponsive subscribers to sunset lists rather than keep sending to them.
If you're sending to your segment, you're layering it on and sprinkling and blending it. Ultimately, you'll still see the segment activity if you're using a tool like Omnisend, for example, based on the actual send at the segment level. And when you're seeing that, you should be able to still see it, right? You're going to see a lower open rate and that's still okay because you should expect that. But more importantly to all of that, Chase, one of the things that I think about very importantly is conversions. Did they buy? If not, do you keep trying? That's really a thing you have to think about. And the reality is, is probably not if you can't. You know, another place to think about is watching those spam complaints, like if they're above 0. 0.1%, 0.2%, that should start raising some red flags because if your engagement after your engagement series, you put them on sunset list, you should stop emailing lists, right? Like just because they're engaged, because you put them in a re-engagement list and they may engage, they may open it, that doesn't mean that they're interested. You've got to see them taking more action on it. So, you know, these are things that you got to think about when you're going through and emailing them and you got to be okay sunsetting them and listing them. Like to me, if I'm re-engaging them, I'm immediately putting them into another list and saying, okay, these people that are falling into this new list, now I'm going to go try to reactivate them A sale or I'm gonna still sunset them again because they're not buying, they're not clicking. For example, they're just opening. That's not really a signal of engagement. That might've been, oh, I saw a subject line that was really healthy and I opened it, but that doesn't mean I should just blend you back into campaign because they're generally gonna fall into that same problem. What you should do is put 'em into a highly curated focused event calling like a sunset basically engagement and try to get those people who are now engaging and try to get them to buy something or do some type of action like an add to cart or something further than just an open ultimately. Subscribe. Subscribe to the pod.
