Justin Coffey commented on my check your assumptions post pointing out his data on opens related to ISPs. He says:
I can say that users at webmail are easily as likely to click on a message that they have opened than users at pay-for ISPs.
Who else collects data on opens per ISP? And Monkeys, I’m looking at you, I know you have this data.
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Oof. Immortalized on the internets with bad grammar. Sigh.
But seriously, I would love to find out what others’ experiences are regarding freemail user activity.
From our experience in France, we record discrepancies of up to 30% in terms of click/open rates between ISP and mailbox provider domains.
We just had a send go out of significant size which had the following open and click rates:
* Hotmail.fr: 13% opens, 11% clicks (FBL 0.12%)
* Orange.fr: 20% opens, 15% clicks
* Yahoo.fr: 19% opens, 13% clicks (FBL 0.23%)
* Campaign Average: 17% opens, 13% clicks
So, give or take, Hotmail and Yahoo performed about the same as orange. We see this pattern repeated quite frequently.
Arg… just to be clear, in reference to my previous post, we see that clicks as a percentage of opens are relatively similar, and frequently superior at webmail providers (eg hotmail, yahoo, gmail) to those from pay-for French ISPs such as Orange, Free and SFR.
That’s what I meant by “give or take, hotmail and yahoo performed about the same as orange.”
(PS Hi Guillaume!)
you all know open rates are lies why do you keep talking about them
Barry has a good point: open rates are unreliable–however they are /relatively/ accurate, especially from the same service provider. This is why email marketers continue to rely on this statistic.