Open
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.
Read MoreWhat 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 is a fairly simple word, and it’s used in email all the time. Recipients open email. Mailbox providers measure that open. Senders measure that open.
It’s critical to remember, though, that open rates as measured by free mailbox provider and open rates tracked by a sender are not really the same thing. They’re measured in very different ways, and there is not a 1:1 mapping between the two measurements.
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.
This made me laugh when a friend posted a link to a Business Insider article about how many website metrics aren’t useful indicators of the business value of a website. Then I found the original blog post referenced in the article: Bullshit Metrics. It’s a great post, you should go read it.
I’d say the concluding paragraph has as much relevance to email marketing as to web marketing.