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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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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