Do open rates matter?

Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns.

E-mail delivers a return on investment so high, it’s practically embarrassing.
It doesn’t require getting fuzzy with the metrics.
But as long as we continue to call the percentage of graphics displayed in a given campaign its “open rate,” we’re being dishonest with everyone who doesn’t know what the metric truly means. And as the national “open rate” continues to drop, the lie gets even bigger.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with Ken here. “Opens” have always been something easy to measure, but hardly anyone actually understands what it means. Open does not mean that someone opened the email, open just means that an image in the email was loaded from the sender’s server. There are a lot of reasons an image might not get loaded even when the email is opened and read by the recipient. Some people, like me, choose not to load images by default. Some ISPs block images by default. Some companies block images. A very small fraction of people use mail clients that do not render images at all. All of these factors will affect open rates.
Measuring performance, real performance, of email marketing is important. Open rates are really not a measure of performance.

Related Posts

Think about that subject line

Ken Magill talks about a study done by People magazine on the importance of subject lines and from lines in getting recipients to open and act on an email.
MailChimp has specific open information about mail sent through their application. They describe the collection of the information used in this blog post.
Recipients really do make open / not-open decisions based just on the visible subject line. MailChimp’s data shows that “boring” subject lines often perform better than pushier more sales like subject lines. One possible explanation is that recipients are used to ignoring spam subject lines, and the more informative a subject line, the more likely it is to be mail they actually open.

Read More

Goodmail

Goodmail made a splash on the email marketing and ISP industries a few years ago by announcing their CertifiedEmail program. They guaranteed that using their certification would result in email going directly to the inbox, and all images in the email would be displayed by default. Senders using Goodmail would pay money, per message, and Goodmail would split that money with the receiving ISP.
This sounds very much like a situation where everyone wins. The senders get their mail to the inbox with images turned on. The receiving ISPs get a little money to deliver email and offloads some of their sender screening onto a third party. Individual recipients know that this email is certified and that it’s safe to click on links in the email.
In the time since CertifiedEmail has been announced, however, there seems to be very little adoption. Sure, receivers do seem to be signing up, a little. AOL and Yahoo have been using CertifiedEmail for a while. In summer 2007, a number of cable providers announced they would be using CertifiedEmail as well.
Senders, on the other hand, don’t seem to be adopting this as fast as Goodmail might like. The Federal Government recently announced they would be sending email signed by Goodmail and some large online companies, Overstock.com among them, are also sending with certified email. In order to get more companies to sign up for CertifiedEmail, Goodmail announced in August 2007 that they had partnered with CheetahMail, Episilon and Axciom Digital to provide free CertifiedEmail to qualifying customers of those ESPs.
Why might companies not be adopting CertifiedEmail? I have a couple of thoughts.

Read More

Permission, Part 1

Before I can talk about permission and how a mailer can collect permission from a recipient to send them email I really need to define what I mean by permission as there are multiple definitions used by various players in the market. Permission marketing was a term coined by Seth Godin in his book entitled Permission Marketing.
The underlying concept beneath permission marketing is that all marketing should be “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Others have defined permission marketing as consumers volunteering or requesting to be marketed to.
When I talk about permission in the email marketing context I mean that the recipient understood *at the time they provided the sender with an email address* that they would receive email from that sender as a result.
Let’s look at some of the relevant parts of that definition.

Read More