What does open rate tell you

There has been an lot written about open rates in the past, but there are two posts that stand out to me. One was the EEC’s post on renaming open rate to render rate and Mark Brownlow’s excellent post on what open rate does and does not measure. I’ve also weighed in on the subject. The issue is still very confused.
If asked, most people will tell you that open rate is the number of emails that were opened by the recipient. The problem is that this isn’t actually true. Open rate is measured by the number of people that display an image in an email. Traditionally this has been a uniquely tagged 1×1 pixel, until some filters and mail clients stopped displaying 1×1 pixels. More recently, every image in an email is tagged, so opening one image would record as an open.
So open rate doesn’t actually tell a sender how many people opened and read an email. It really only records that an image in a particular email is loaded. It does not record when an email is opened. Some people don’t load images by default. Some people don’t load images at all, even when they open and actively read the text portion of the email.
Clearly, there are some uses for open rates. It can give a useful metric when comparing different forms of the same email (A/B testing) and when looking at user engagement over time. However, we have also recently seen that open rate is not predictive for click through rate.

Related Posts

Standardizing email metrics

Slogging towards e-mail metrics standardization a report by Direct Mag on the efforts of the Email Experience Council to standardize definitions related to email marketing.

Read More

Asking the right question

My job as a consultant does involve answering questions and solving problems. Often the most important, and most overlooked, thing that I do is change the question that clients are asking. It is not that this changes the problem or even, really, changes the solution. It does change how people think of the problem, and changing how they think of the problem drives better solutions.
This can be applied to the current Email Experience Council (EEC) discussion on metrics and defining what a render rate was. Loren has a post up today detailing a number of common email situations and explaining in which cases an email is counted as open and in which cases an email is counted as unopened.
Right now an open in email terms is actually quite simple: a tagged image on a remote webserver was loaded. That’s all an open is. It used to be that no one was blocking images by default, so this was actually quite an accurate way to measure how many people were opening and presumably reading an email (at least for people using mail clients that display HTML and images).
But, as spammers started including more and more explicit images in email, recipients started asking for images to be blocked. In response to recipient requests, ISPs started blocking images by default. No longer was open rate a measure of which recipients opened and read an email, it became a measure of something completely different.
The EEC has recognized this is a problem and have decided that standardization would be a solution. As the first step to standardization they have identified two problems: open rate isn’t calculated in any standard way and the resulting ratio doesn’t describe what most people think it describes. Their recent publication The Email Render Rate defines standard calculations for render rates. This way render rates as reported by different ESPs can be directly compared. Changing the name from open rate to render rate changes what most people expect that the term means. No longer is this a measure of how many recipients opened the mail, but rather it is a measure of how many email clients rendered the images in the mail.
Maybe a better solution could be arrived at by changing the question? Instead of “how can we standardize render rate?” perhaps they should ask the question: “What do people think they’re measuring when they talk about open rates?”
Once the “what?” question is answered, perhaps a good solution to the “how?” question will become more obvious.

Read More

Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email.
I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

Read More