Email campaign open rate statistic is not a good measure of success

Email open rate statistic is widely used as a credible measurable quantifier of success of email marketing campaigns. However, its significance nowadays should be disputed as it represents only a partial outlook on the recipient engagement with an email.

Firstly, email open rate is usually calculated by the amount of requests for a 1x1px transparent GIF image. This means that if a recipient is reading a text version of your email (say, on a Blackberry) or previews the content of the email in an a preview pane of an email client that blocks remote images by default, an open isn’t going to register. There are ways of tracking open rates of text email, but I wouldn’t recommend them.

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Want to grow your email list?

Main rule: DO NOT BUY COLD DATA. EVER.

Even if the cold data is promised to deliver results because it fits your required Mosaic socio-demographic profile, because it has 100% valid email addresses, etc., it is still cold data. Even if the recipients know about you, your company, your products, but haven’t explicitly given you their email address at some point in time, the chance of them hitting a ‘spam’ button increase exponentially once they start receiving email from you out of nowhere.

Besides, a cold data list also suffers from list fatigue and level of unsubscribes a lot more than a list of subscribers who engaged themselves in the first place. It also costs more to email to and usually doesn’t provide a good ROI per subscriber.

So, how can you make your money go further?

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The quality of data used in personalisation

With the recent changes in the ISPs and email providers’ email acceptance policies many marketers stress the ever increasing importance of deliverability. Surely, deliverability is one of the things that would enjoy much attention in 2008, but getting an email into an inbox is only half the job done (same goes for direct mail). What happens when an email or a mail piece is opened?

Usually, one of the first and most important things that stand out right from the start are salutations and addressing, so it would make perfect sense to get this one right. After all, this is what the recipient sees almost immediately and it makes a big impact on whether the rest of the message will be read or it will meet the bin.

So, what’s the best way to get it right? Read more

Secma Qpod Club

Cunninghams Auto is sponsoring a newly set up Secma Qpod Club that is designed to bring Secma Qpod owners and people who are interested in off-roading experiences together.

The Secma Qpod Club is accepting membership requests now and will be getting a word out soon on the membership details and goodies that come with it, as well as the first get-together.

Email tracking and readnotify.com

In the process of looking for a way to implement open rate tracking in an in-house created HTML email system, I had a look at readnotify.com. Their web page claims to provide tracking for:

• Date and time opened – by using tracking images, etc.
• Location of recipient (per their ISP city /town) – by the IP address of the recipient’s mail server
• Map of location (available on paid subscriptions) – by the IP address of the recipient’s mail server
• Recipient’s IP address – by the IP address of the recipient’s mail server
• Apparent email address of opening (if available)
• Referrer details (i.e. if accessed via web mail, etc.) – by the receiving mail server headers
• URL clicks – by embedding tracking code into URLs
• How long the email was read for
• How many times your email was opened – by using tracking images
• If your email was forwarded, or opened on a different computer

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