Email open rates have been declining steadily for the past few years, but don’t let your open rate fool you - the term ‘open rate’ is actually one of the email marketing industry’s most egregious misnomers. According to a 2007 Internet Retailer Survey, only 24.2% of web merchants have an email open rate greater than 25% but that doesn’t mean that only 25% of consumers are reading or noticing the emails sent to them.
Emails are tracked by embedding image tags and lines of link-tracking code that point to a specified server. When an image that resides on that server is downloaded and displayed in your email, or when your recipient clicks on a link in the email containing the special tracking code, the email is counted as having been ‘opened’ by your recipient.
If your recipient doesn’t click on a link or enable the images to display in your email, the email will not be counted as ‘opened’ even though your recipient is capable of scanning and reading the text in your email. Since ISPs like Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, and Outlook are increasingly disabling image displays and allowing their users to control the display of images inside emails, email open rates are trending down in accordance with the number of consumers who manually enable images or change their default settings. Oddly, most consumers I talk to in my seminars scan even the most familiar emails they receive without viewing the images, and unless they find something of interest when they scan, the images remain disabled and the email is deleted without a click.
Does this mean that text-only emails are a better way to go? Not really. Design elements such as fonts, headlines, colors, borders, columns, links, bulleted lists, links, and image placeholders still display with images disabled, and many ISPs display an image description in place of disabled images so the user can better decide whether the image is important enough to view or whether to trust the image and the sender enough to enable all images.
So don’t go re-sending your emails to everyone on your list who didn’t ‘open’ your email according to your tracking report. Instead, assume that your audience received and scanned your email unless you have hard evidence to indicate that your email was not delivered. Use good headlines, image descriptions, and consistent design elements, then use your click through statistics and your Email Service Provider’s sender reputation and delivery rate to gauge your success in delivering emails. Your Email Service Provider will tell you your click-through rate, and you can look up your Email Service Provider’s delivery rate at www.SenderScore.org. (Just make sure you look up the email servers that the company uses to send their customers’ email, not the server they use to send internal corporate communications).
John Arnold is the Regional Development Director for Constant Contact and author of the book Email Marketing for Dummies.
