There has been a lot of discussion in various places recently about subject line length and how it affects email marketing. There have been multiple studies done on how the subject line affects opens and clicks. (Mailchimp, Alchemy Worx, Mailer Mailer, Adestra). The discussion has even spilled over into Ken Magill’s newsletter today. I’ve had a couple people ask me my opinion on...
I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week, after the folks over at IBM/Pivotal Veracity called me to tell me about this. But now their post is out, so I can share.
There are ISPs providing real metrics to senders: QQ and Mail.ru. Check out Laura Villevieille’s blog post for the full details.
Most regular readers know I think open and click through rates are actually proxy measurements. That is they measure things that correlate with reading and interacting with an email and can be used to estimate how much an email is wanted by the recipients. The holy grail is, of course, having ISPs report back exact metrics on what a user did with an email. Did the user read it? Did it stay open...
Most email marketers want to see their open rates go up. This particular marketer has come up with a new way to force recipients to load their mail. I’m not sure how successful this approach is going to be. I can see how this might increase open rate, as people who are interested in registering but may not load images by default actually load images. On the other hand, how common is it to...
Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results. The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement...
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.
The EEC has been working on standardizing metrics used in email marketing. They have published a set of definitions for different terms many email marketers use. They published their Support the Adoption of Email Metrics (S.A.M.E) guide in June. Under the new EEC definitions an open is measured when either a tracking pixel is displayed or a user clicks on any link in the email, including the...
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...
A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam. Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999...
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.
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