Forcing those opens

Most email marketers want to see their open rates go up. This particular marketer has come up with a new way to force recipients to load their mail.

I’m not sure how successful this approach is going to be. I can see how this might increase open rate, as people who are interested in registering but may not load images by default actually load images. On the other hand, how common is it to not load images by default? I tend to think I’m unusual in that I have images off by default. But if I was really interested in attending the presentation I would probably open images. But I’d be a clickthrough if I was interested enough.
Any thoughts on how successful this might be at increasing the open rate?

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Inbox rates and conversion rates

Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results.
The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement, Epsilon is seeing an increase in average open rate.

There are any number of reasons this could be happening, including simply different ways the numbers are calculated. I am not sure it’s just a numbers issue, though. Many of Epsilon’s clients are very big companies with a very experienced marketing team. The Return Path data is across their whole user base, which is a much broader range of marketers at different levels of sophistication.
I expect that the Epsilon data is a subset of the Return Path data, and a subset at the high end at that. It does hint, though, that when the inbox is less cluttered, recipients are more likely to open the commercial mail that does get in there.

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What email metrics do you use?

Vertical Response talks about email metrics that are useful on a dashboard.
Metrics are an ongoing challenge for all marketers. The underlying need for metrics is to evaluate how effective a particular marketing program is. Picking metrics involves understanding what the goal is for a particular program. If your goal is brand recognition then perhaps sales and click-through figures aren’t a good metric. If your goal is sales then opens is not as good a metric as average order value or revenue per email.
Measuring email success is important. But how you choose to measure it is a critical decision. Too many marketers just use canned metrics and don’t think about what they really want to know.

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Freemail opens

Justin Coffey commented on my check your assumptions post pointing out his data on opens related to ISPs. He says:

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