I can remember back in the day when open rates were the cats meow!  Every marketer was testing and tweaking and trying to squeeze a few more opens out of their subscriber base (and celebrating accordingly when their percentages crept up a few spots).

Then, as new security precautions emerged to fight off the undesirable and potentially emotionally scarring images that appeared in spam messages, open rates began to drop and marketers scrambled even harder to find ways to coax their users to open that email.  When they realized that wasn't working, they started preaching that open rates are history and the click is where it's at - because, well, only people that click are worth anything right? (Okay, there's a lot of gross generalization going on here but stay with me...)   Don't get me wrong, clicks are wonderful and telling but I still think that even as a flawed metric (as long as we realize it's flawed) the open number can provide some value too (can't be hatin' on the open).

Anyways, times have continued to change and while the open rate is not a useless metric, there are bigger and better things to concentrate on.  What you might ask? Everything that happens after the click! Being able to truely see how your email performed from a revenue/conversion standpoint carries a lot of weight - especially when budget time rolls around and you want that 50k more for a new email system!

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