MindComet

RIP: Open Rates

The way open rates are measured is dead. The logic simply isn’t accurate anymore. And the reason why it doesn’t work in 2009 is that most ISPs prevent images from rendering by default.

For those who are unaware, an “open” for an email send is marked as such when a small 1x1 transparent image is displayed by the end user.  The problem is that now most people don’t change their email preferences to allow images to display. This was an accurate way to represent an open years ago—before spammers inundated inboxes with embedded images in their emails.  And because of spammers, ISPs cracked down and began blocking images by default.  At this point, the open rate as we knew it became obsolete and out-dated.

The EEC has an on-going discussion on what to do about this issue for email marketers.  They believe that a standardization between ESPs and marketers alike is the first step in clarify the issue, and I couldn’t agree more.  Sure, someone can open an email, click a link, go to a landing page and buy something—all the while never displaying an image—and it still won’t count as an “open”.  The old-school logic of an “open rate” will now be called a “render rate”—which is a much more accurate description of what’s actually happening.

But how long will it take for all of this to be digested and adopted across the board?  Well, I for one hope it happens sooner than later.  The EEC wants your feedback on this issue. Read more about it by downloading the “Email Render Rate” whitepaper here.

Stay tuned for further developments on render rates and their industry-wide adoptions.

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Posted by MindComet on Mar. 13, 2009

Is Texting Taking Over Teen’s Properness?

I was reading Tiffany Young’s article today on iMediaConnection on how to reach teens through email.  I started coming to some of the same realizations she did a few weeks back while out with family and friends.  We were all eating dinner and my friend’s children were at the dinner table, pizza in one hand and their cell phones in the other, texting what seemed to be 100 words a minute.  Their trick to being able to text so quickly while still getting their meal down was to abbreviate every word they could so their message would come out to something like this, “what r u doing?’ and “nm, c u 2morrow.”  All this abbreviated texting got me to thinking, are teens going to remember to capitalize beginning of sentences and end their sentences with proper punctuation or is texting going to take over their daily responses to email and face to face communication?  Young made a very valid point that if you get the right message across you can get the user to click on email messages however I’m still curious to learn what happens when that 89 percent have to hit the reply button?  Yesterday we pointed out that email is here to stay but are the demographics and purposes for using email changing?

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Posted by MindComet on Aug. 03, 2007