Justin Coffey commented on my check your assumptions post pointing out his data on opens related to ISPs. He says:
I can say that users at webmail are easily as likely to click on a message that they have opened than users at pay-for ISPs.
Who else collects data on opens per ISP? And Monkeys, I’m looking at you, I know you have this data.
Over the weekend, one of the major ISPs purged a lot of abandoned accounts from their system. This has resulted in a massive increase in 550 user unknown bounces at that ISP. This ISP is one of those that uses bounces to feed into their reputation system and the purge may cause otherwise good senders to be blocked temporarily.
Talking to clients and other industry folks, it looks like the addresses that have newly bounced off had zero activity for at least 6 months. Nothing. Nada. No clicks. No opens. No interaction.
This is why data hygiene is so critical. Just because the emails are being accepted at the ISP, and even showing inbox placement at the mailbox monitoring companies does not mean that there is actually someone reading your email. Failure to look at overall data means that when an ISP bulk deletes abandoned accounts then bounces will increase. While I don’t expect this to have any real, long term effect on sender reputation I do expect that some senders with a lot of cruft on their list will see some short term delivery problems.
Companies that run re-engagement campaigns saw a whole lot less bouncing and even less blocking as a result of the purge. They were removing addresses that were non-responsive all along and thus didn’t have major deadwood on their list.
Ongoing data hygiene shows you what your list really is, not your list plus abandoned accounts. The addresses that the ISP purged? They were not valuable anyway. No one was reading that mail for at least 6 months.
If you did see a spike in bounces this weekend at a major ISP, you should really look at engagement. If some percentage of recipients at one ISP are actually non-existent, then it’s likely that about that same number are non-existent at other major ISPs as well. What are you going to do to identify and remove those dead addresses from your lists?
A question came up on a mailing list about how long it typically took to resolve a spam block at an ISP. I don’t think that question actually has a single answer, as each ISP has their own, special, process.
ISPA takes 5 minutes. You fill out a form, it runs through their automated system and you’re usually delisted.
ISPB asks a lot of questions in their form, so it takes about 15 minutes to collect all the data they want and 10 minutes to fill out their form. Then, using very, very short words you keep repeating what you need to the tier 1 person who initially responded. That person eventually figures out they can’t blow you off and throws your request to tier 2, who handles it immediately.
ISPC has a different, somewhat long form. Again, you spend time collecting all the data and then fill out the somewhat obscure form. You get a response, but it’s a boilerplate totally unrelated to the initial request, so you keep answering until you find a tier 1 rep who can read and do what you initially asked.
ISPD has a form that takes about 2 minutes to fill out. Unfortunately, it goes to an outsourced postmaster team in the Far East and response times are ranging from days to months right now.
ISPE has an email address and if you catch them on a good day, they’re very helpful. Sometimes there’s no response, though.
ISPF has a troubleshooting page and accept requests to fix things, but never respond in any visible manner.
ISPG they tells you to talk to Spamfiltering Company H.
Spamfiltering company H answers their email in a prompt and friendly manner. OK, sometimes the answers are just “wow, your client/customer/IP range is sending lots of spam,” but hey, it’s an answer.
Spamfiltering company I is a useless bag of protoplasm and don’t even answer the email address they give you on their webpages. In a fit of fairness, I have heard they will occasionally respond, but usually that response is to tell you to go pay some apparently unrelated company a bribe to get delisted.
Spamfiltering company J doesn’t have a lot of ways to contact them, but have a lot of folks that participate in various semi-public arenas so if you’re even slightly part of the community, you can email them and they’re very helpful.
Spamfiltering company K is totally useless, but will tell you to have recipients whitelist you.
There has been an lot written about open rates in the past, but there are two posts that stand out to me. One was the EEC’s post on renaming open rate to render rate and Mark Brownlow’s excellent post on what open rate does and does not measure. I’ve also weighed in on the subject. The issue is still very confused.
If asked, most people will tell you that open rate is the number of emails that were opened by the recipient. The problem is that this isn’t actually true. Open rate is measured by the number of people that display an image in an email. Traditionally this has been a uniquely tagged 1×1 pixel, until some filters and mail clients stopped displaying 1×1 pixels. More recently, every image in an email is tagged, so opening one image would record as an open.
So open rate doesn’t actually tell a sender how many people opened and read an email. It really only records that an image in a particular email is loaded. It does not record when an email is opened. Some people don’t load images by default. Some people don’t load images at all, even when they open and actively read the text portion of the email.
Clearly, there are some uses for open rates. It can give a useful metric when comparing different forms of the same email (A/B testing) and when looking at user engagement over time. However, we have also recently seen that open rate is not predictive for click through rate.