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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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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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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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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