 E-mail Open Rates: The Mystery of the Disappearing Reader
By Shari Worthington
President
Open rates for promotional e-mail and for the more substantive e-newsletter have been dropping precariously. A little over a year ago, we regularly saw open rates for solid, educational e-newsletters in the 60-70% range. Today, those same types of vehicles are pulling open rates closer to 30-40%. And that’s if they’re doing everything right. We were shocked to find out that many other agencies in the field are seeing open rates more like 1-2%.
What’s the problem, you ask? We’ve been asking the very same thing for the last year. And now we’re starting to figure out the answers.
In some cases, the problem is “list fatigue.” When you send the same kind of information to the very same people again and again, their initial enthusiasm tends to dampen. They no longer rush to request that next white paper or to RSVP to your exciting new seminar. But that isn’t the whole answer because response rates to e-mail marketing messages have not declined. Depending on what you’re sending, we’re still seeing the same relative percentages of click-through rates in each mailing.
What has changed is the technology behind the scenes. In response to the rise of spam, many ISPs have added new systems that allow users to read the text of an e-mail but block all the images. In fact, our new ISP does this when we read our e-mail online, through our browser. Image blocking is now used by Gmail, Microsoft Outlook 2003, and AOL 9.0. In many cases, the default is to block images. Most users aren’t quite savvy enough to know how to change it.
Why does image blocking matter? Because that’s how e-mail marketers track open rates. Either a main header graphic in the e-mail or a small one-pixel graphic in the bottom corner has a special URL that’s tracked for the number of times it’s hit. That tells you how many times the e-mail has been opened.
M+R Strategic Services published some interesting data on this topic. They work with not-for-profit and fundraising organizations. They received permission from their clients to do a test to find out how many people are really opening the e-mail from their group. It turns out, about 20% of the people who received and opened the e-mail weren’t being reported. That’s a 20% underreport. So if you’re getting a 35% open rate today, it’s not unlikely that the real number is more like 55%!
The study found that Gmail, Verizon, Comcast, MSN, and Earthlink were the biggest undrereporters. Worse than that, .edu domains had a whopping 34% that underreported (how paranoid are .edu IT departments?!?).
Despite their limitations, open rates are a useful statistic. They can help you determine which of two test mailings is more successful. They can tell you which test subject line performs better. And they can give you a relative feel from month to month how well your e-mail is being received. Are people opening it and clicking through? You need to watch both statistics to really know how well things are working. |
