Views may be everywhere, whether you are aware of them or not. From mall settings, gyms, colleges, cafes, restaurants, etc. But are they meaningful? At times, Views are being recorded, without the explicit or conscious knowledge of the reader. And therein lies the biggest challenge facing marketers.

Let’s consider a real-world example: Spending 2 hours at a local mall. We’ve all done it at one point or another. We get bombarded with several tens or even hundreds of different views over the course of our visit. However, for the store owner, what really counts is if the person [the Viewer] steps inside the store as a direct result of the “View” e.g. a “for sale” sign or another window promotion.

This is the equivalent of receiving a Click on your email message in the virtual world.

At this point, the store owner’s job is to convince them to make a purchase. They may achieve this by varying their selection, price, offering exclusivity, cross-selling other brands etc. This is equivalent of an online Conversion i.e. when a “sale” has taken place.

So, you quickly start realizing that Views really don’t matter or are less meaningful in the overall context of the purchase cycle! What really matters, are Clicks and Conversions.

Don’t get me wrong. Views do matter, but only to the extent that they deliver Visitors and Purchasers in the offline world or in the virtual world, Clicks and Conversions. The latter may not exist without the former, albeit too much importance on delivering more views would be the equivalent of mall-traffic jumping 10x without any increase in store traffic or business for the store owner. In the end, there’s no real ROI.

Apply these concepts to email marketing and it leads to suppressed metrics by artificially deflating the percentage of Clicks and Conversions. At other times, like in text-only emails, Views don’t get record at all. Perhaps, text-based emails are a smarter medium of measurement!

On the other hand, a Conversion is a measure that’s universally identifiable and more reliable, irrespective of nuances like the prospect’s email client [Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail etc.], whether the user has images enabled or not and whether they receive the email in HTML or Plain text format. A Conversion takes place when the email recipient takes action [clicks] on the Call-to-Action within your email and completes the intended action e.g. visits a landing page and fills out a form, downloads a product trial or a whitepaper.

So, really, there’s one and only one metric that really matters when it comes to email marketing. And that’s Conversion. Email Optimization Techniques are still relevant and important but they are just a means to an end. Poor email optimization ultimately leads to fewer Conversions and we all know what fewer Conversions does to our business.

However, the quintessential goal of email marketing is a Conversion and that’s the metric you should focus on improving.