Jody asks “Are ‘prefetch opens’ and ‘proxy opens’ the same thing?” Non-human opens An “open” is just someone (or something) fetching a remote image. A non-human-interaction (NHI) open is where some sort of automation fetches the image without human interaction – i.e. it’s fetched when the automation feels like it, not triggered by a user...
When opens hurt reputation
Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails. I get maybe a dozen of this style of email a week. It’s pretty annoying but whatever. I delete them, blog about them or, very occasionally, share them with some folks who might have a big bigger of a stick to...
What is an open?
I was having a discussion today with a few industry colleagues about engagement and open rates. It was a good discussion and inspired a couple blog posts. Engagement totally matters, Engagement affects deliverability, and ISPs should be the last of your concerns. I think they’ve covered the engagement issue pretty well, but what I wanted to talk about was metrics, specifically opens. Open...
Meaningless metrics
I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good...