What does open rate tell 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.

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When an open is not a sign of interest

A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam.
Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999 and stopped using it for most of the rest of my mail around 2001. This address, though, is on any number of spam mailing lists. The spam that gets through is usually sent by hard-core spammers. The ISP that hosts that mailbox uses Communigate Pro to filter mail, so much of the casual spam is filtered.
Generally, if I open an email (and load images or click through) on that account it is only in order to track down a spammer. For instance, I’m getting a lot of spam there from affiliates offering me the opportunity to purchase printing services for a very low price. I have actually been opening the mail, and clicking through. But I’m not clicking through because I’m interested in purchasing. I’m clicking through to see if my reports to abuse@ printer are resulting in any action against the spammers. (They’re not).
The thing is, though, I know that by clicking through on ads, I’ve now been promoted by the spammer to the “clicks on emails! it’s a live address!” list. Which only means I’m going to get more spam from them. Lucky me.
Using clicks and opens as a measure of engagement isn’t necessarily bad. But when using them you have to understand the limitations of the measurement and that what you may think it’s telling you isn’t actually what it’s telling you.

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Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email.
I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

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Best time to send marketing email

Pages and pages have been written about the best time to send email. Marketers spend significant amounts of energy discussing and researching the best time of the day and the best day of the week to send email. I have long thought that these discussions do not put enough attention on individual end users and how the recipients interact with email.
Researchers recently developed a model for email user behaviour that splits email users into two classes “e-mailaholics” that send, and presumably read, email all the time and “day labourers” that send, and presumably read, email during standard business hours. There is very little transition between groups, 75% of users stayed in the same usage group over the 2 years of the study.
What does this mean for senders? Senders need to know know how their recipients use email and which user group recipients are. By analyzing clicks and opens, senders can classify recipients and use that data to send mail that is more relevant and better targeted.
h/t arXiv blog at Technology Review

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