Your Open Rate May Not Be As Important As You Think
According to the Marketing Sherpa 2007 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide, analysts and email experts are moving away from open rates as a success measure and using it instead as benchmark to determine the success of subject lines.
But why the shift?
Preview panes allow for opens to register, even if the recipient never actually looks at the message. Simply by tabbing past it, even briefly and the images load, an open is recorded. There is no connection to the interaction of the recipient with the message.
On the flip side, blocked images can also skew the results. Images in new the version of Hotmail, a.k.a Windows LiveMail, AOL, Outlook 2003 and Yahoo! Email beta are blocked by default. This means that the tiny transparent image that allows opens to be registered does not get activated.
Because open rates are generally based on delivered email messages filtering has proved to have a negative effect on open rates. While it may appear that the message has been delivered it may actually have been stopped before it ever got the recipient’s inbox.
While the open rate reported by your ESP may be inaccurate, it still provides worth as a week-to-week or month-to-month determination of interest level in a given email. Marketing Sherpa is reporting that for the first time, a drop in the number of marketers tracking email open rates.
So what should marketers use to measure success? We’ll give you the answer in an upcoming post.
Posted by MindComet on Jan. 11, 2007