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According to Hubspot, 85% of marketers consider short-form videos the most effective on social media. But how to measure the success of your campaigns when it comes to automated marketing? By tracking specific metrics, brands can evaluate the performance of their marketing campaigns and fine-tune their marketing efforts even better. In this article, we look at open rates - one of the most widely-accepted metrics that can effectively evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. Read along to know more about how you can monitor your campaigns by using open rates.

What are Open Rates?

Monitoring the open rates is a highly-popular method of gauging the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. From emails to SMS campaigns - open rates give you a general indication of the measure of success of your marketing efforts. For example, email open rate refers to the number of users opening your emails from the total number of emails sent to the subscribers.

However, measuring the open rates is the first step towards understanding how relevant and appropriate your marketing campaigns have been. What matters next is not only how many people open your messages but also what percentage of them become a part of the sales funnel and ultimately become paying customers.

Therefore, it is always advisable to use the metric of open rate in association with A/B testing subject lines if your marketing campaign consists of a set of emails talking about your products or services. Apart from giving you a quantitative measurement of how successful your marketing campaigns have been, open rates are also reflective of your brand's goodwill and reputation.

When you see an increase in the percentage of open rates, know that your marketing team is doing a good job of convincing prospective customers and turning them into paying users.

Open Rates Calculation

There are two formulas that you can use to calculate the open rates of your campaigns. The first one is a basic and widely-accepted formula while the second one is a more advanced formula.

Formula 1:
Open Rate = (Total no. of unique opens/Total no. of recipients) x 100

Here, we use two variables:

Total recipients - the total no. of people on the mailing list/total no. of people who are being exposed to the marketing campaigns

Total unique opens - the total no. of people who actually open the emails

Formula 2:
Open Rate = {Total no. of unique opens/ (Total no. of recipients - total no. of bounced emails)} x 100

Total recipients - the total no. of people on the mailing list/total no. of people who are being exposed to the marketing campaigns

Total unique opens - the total no. of people who actually open the emails

Bounced emails - the total no. of emails that do not reach customers' inbox

How are Open Rates calculated?

Email Open Rates:
If you are concerned about how effective your email marketing strategy is, the best way is to check your email open rates. This can help you find out the total number of users who actually open the emails they receive.

Following the formula, in the case of email campaigns:

Open rate = (Emails Opened/Emails Sent) x 100

Push Notifications:
As per Adweek, push notifications have a higher open rate which is at least twice the open rate of email marketing. The greatest plus points of push notifications are that they are scheduled, relevant and occur in real-time, serving customers on the go.
Open rate or click rate of push notification are the same. It is calculated by the number of notification clicks per 100 users who have received the push notification.

Push notifications open rates are highly important when you need to consider the growth strategy of your business and its profitability. The average open rate of push notifications is 7.8% and it is a great tool for brands to build cordial relationships with their users.

SMS Campaigns:
SMS open rates represent the number of times an SMS recipient opens and reads the marketing messages sent out to them.

Brands of all sizes rely heavily on SMS campaigns as a part of their overall digital marketing strategy. When you apply automated marketing to SMS campaigns, you create better opportunities to engage more with your customers and enhance the chance of successful lead conversions.

WhatsApp Marketing:
With WhatsApp transforming from a social media tool to a utility application, more than 500 businesses globally use this platform as a means to convey interesting details, special discounts or the latest news about their products and services. WhatsApp for Business supports seamless and real-time conversations between brands and their customers, with a higher open rate than SMS marketing.

Challenges in calculating open rates

As happens with any other metrics, open rates are also not always 100% accurate. Several things determine the accuracy of open rates and here comes the possibility of coming up with incorrect calculations for open rates.

Many subscribers today have their firewall settings enabled to prevent images from entering their email systems. This could prevent the tracking pixels attached in emails to not load properly. Open rates might not be accurate in such cases.

Spam filters sometimes reflect inaccurate figures as they make emails open automatically even if your subscribers haven't opened and read your emails.

Large emails over 100KB leads to clipped messages which can also hamper the loading of the tracking images.

The best agencies offering marketing automation services in the US can help you in finding out accurate open rates by providing in-depth analysis and real-time reports so that you can sharpen your marketing efforts.

How to improve open rates for marketing campaigns?

Here are some of the useful ways in which you can improve the open rates for your marketing campaigns:

• Check the content of the campaign and make sure it is interesting enough. Keep your subject lines short, descriptive and personalized to each user's preference. While companies nowadays use emojis to garner more attention, using emotions unnecessarily can backfire as well
• Segregate your audience according to their locations, interests and activities and try to build trust by sharing the right information with the right set of audiences. By segmenting your audience, you will be able to increase the conversion rates and prevent yourself from sending irrelevant messages that might annoy your customers
• Monitor the frequency of your campaigns. Sending too much advertisement content or too less can affect your brand negatively. So, understand the needs and the response time of your audience, find out the date and time when they are the most responsive and then, draw up a proper schedule so that your campaigns are evenly distributed and follow a routine

Are you looking for a reliable company that you can trust with your marketing efforts? With Springwood marketing automation service, you can get accurate reports of your campaigns and real-time analytics to work on them effectively.

Final Thoughts

When you choose the best marketing automation service in the US, you can reap the full benefits of your marketing automation investment. From segregating users into separate groups to perfecting the target audience - marketing automation companies collaborate with brands to drive sales and leads.

Therefore, measuring the success of a campaign becomes crucial to attaining predetermined goals and improving campaigns creating a more successful brand. If you are looking to gain customer insights and develop data-backed reports following a detailed study of your campaigns, avail Springwood marketing automation service and accelerate your business growth.

Keywords - marketing campaigns, open rate, customer retention, customer engagement, marketing automation, automated marketing services in US

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