Why Email opens is a Bad Metric to measure prospect engagement
Written by Lidia Vijga
Table of Contents
Why click-through rate and email opens is not enough to accurately measure prospect engagement?
Merely measuring an email click-through rate and email opens does not give sufficient insight into prospect engagement levels. These metrics can be extremely misleading.
To gauge a prospect’s interest, you need granular document analytics to track their engagement with sales collateral and presentations you share.
Have you ever been excited to see that your email has been opened only to find out later that the prospect isn’t actually interested in what you have to say? All sales reps have done it. They’d follow up with this “engaged prospect” multiple times just to realize later that their valuable time and energy has gone down the drain.
Although it helps to see when and if an email has been opened, however, that doesn’t signal that the prospect is engaged. There could have been other stakeholders and decision-makers who viewed the sales collateral after the initial email opening. Your sales collateral could’ve been downloaded and shared with somebody else on the team. They might’ve even looked at it. Maybe even had a discussion. Or they might’ve opened it, skimmed through it, and then closed it. At most what you can see is that they clicked on it.
You are left in the dark. Putting it another way, it’s like throwing something into a black box. To be able to prioritize a prospect and ensure you are spending time wisely, sales reps need more information than just whether or not a prospect opened an email and clicked a link.
High click-through rates and email opens do not always indicate engaged prospects.
Learn how to increase effectiveness of your sales collateral.
How Apple's Mail Privacy Protection affects email prospecting?
Apple Mail users have the option (that is turned on by default) to prevent email senders from seeing their IP addresses when they open an email. It also conceals the user’s location, which was previously visible to the sender. This feature stops email senders from being able to see if a user opened their emails. As a result, sales reps and marketers that rely on email opens to track engagement making their decision based on inaccurate data.
If you want to learn more about this topic, be sure to read our article on Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.
How to measure prospect engagement beyond email click-through rate and email opens?
Tracking email click-through rate and email opens is a great start to any sales engagement strategy. However, they usually only reveal prospect behavior within the confines of the email.
You want to be able to see past the email and into the company you’re prospecting.
Even if your click-through and email open rates are high, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your prospects are engaged. There could be a number of reasons why they’re clicking on your emails, but that doesn’t mean they’re interested in what you have to say or offer.
In order to gauge whether or not your prospects are truly engaged, you need to look at other factors such as how many times they’ve opened your sales collateral, what pages they’ve viewed, and how long they’ve stayed on each page, whether or not they’ve shared it with somebody else on the team. If you’re seeing high levels of engagement with your sales materials, then you know you’re on the right track. DeckLinks’s sales collateral engagement analytics can help you accomplish that!
For example, you’ve shared a PDF presentation about your product with a prospect, who then forwarded the email attachment to their manager. If they hadn’t told you that they’d forwarded your email, how would you know? When would you follow-up and how?
If you had used DeckLinks, you’d have been notified when your sales collateral was opened by another individual, who is more likely to be the actual decision-maker. Knowing who the key stakeholders are can help you accelerate the sales cycle and allows you to follow up more effectively and strategically.
DeckLinks’ real-time engagement analytics provides a level of insight into prospects’ engagement that feels like magic and it is something that every sales rep and business developer has to experience!
Page-by-page analytics is an invaluable tool for understanding how prospects engage with sales collateral.
It enables sales reps to see who is viewing their presentations or proposals, and how much time each prospect spends on each slide. This allows them to identify which parts of their PDF prospects focus on the most, helping them follow better and be more strategic on the follow-up calls.
If you know exactly what parts of your presentation caught their attention and which parts didn’t resonate at all, then you’ll have an easier time understanding your prospect. By understanding which parts of your presentation engaged your prospect and which fell flat, you’ll be able to better understand prospects’ needs. There’s no more guessing about when and how to follow-up and what should you focus on during your next call.
The DeckLinks’ client-facing user interface is similar to a microsite or web page. A trackable link allows your clients and prospects to view your presentations and documents on any device without having to log in or download anything.
You will be able to see how prospects view and interact with your sales collateral, whether they are simple one-pagers or long PDF presentations.
If you want to learn more about PDF documents tracking, be sure to read our article.
How to prioritize prospects using document analytics?
With DeckLinks, you’re able to get engagement analytics about your prospects so that you can prioritize the ones that are showing signs of high engagement and avoid or spend less time on those who show minimal or no interest in the information that you are sharing.
DeckLinks provides you with actionable insights in real-time available at your fingertips to help you make more informed decisions.
Here is how you can prioritize prospects with DeckLinks based on their engagement with your emails and sales collateral:
High priority prospect:
Prospects who have gone through your presentations more than once and have shared them with other team members.
Medium priority prospect:
Prospects who have engaged with and read your presentations at least once but have never shared them with anybody else.
Low priority prospect:
Prospects who have opened and perhaps even read your emails or even responded but have never opened your presentation.
Prioritizing prospects this way will help you be more strategic with your sales engagement strategy.
Make strategic decisions based on prospect engagement data
If a prospect suggests that they are interested, but they are clearly in your ‘Low priority bucket’, they may not be as enthusiastic as they claim.
Alternatively, you may not hear from another prospect for several weeks or even months. You’ve tried following up but no dice. But based on the document analytics you can see that they’ve given your materials to other people on their team. If you are seeing that all of those people have engaged with your presentation or proposal many times, you can be more confident that they are interested in what you have to offer. Moreover, they are most likely reviewing your proposal with other decision-makers.
This prospect still appears to be a high-priority lead, and thus is worth further pursuing.
Not only do increased prospect engagement insights help you prioritize leads, but they can also increase the accuracy of your sales forecasting.
Having data points that show how interested prospects are in a product or service will help you make better decisions when it comes to sending quotes and rate cards.
That level of insight is just not possible if you only track email click-through rate and email opens.
Interested? Try DeckLinks today,sign up for a FREE 14-day trial and see how your prospects engage with your sales collateral!
Measure sales engagement.
Win more deals.
Share video PDF presentations and maintain sales momentum at every stage of the buyer's journey.
New to using video for sales? Want to brainstorm some video selling ideas with our team?
Hop on a virtual coffee with us! Let’s make a video PDF presentation together and take your sales videos to the next level!
SALES RUSH
Most entertaining and insightful show for virtual sales and marketing teams
In this high-intensity mini game, B2B sales leaders and influencers get to answer 20 questions in 2 minutes.