2021
How you should be sending every email in your business
We all send out 100’s of emails from our business every
week if not every day. Each one of these emails is a touch point with
your market be it direct or indirect.&...
Many people quite understandably are confused about their open rate statistics in their e-mail marketing campaigns. Understanding what this content you will greatly assist you in achieving improved open rates for your future campaigns.
Any reputable e-mail marketing system, such as we use with Business Catalyst, or other systems such as MailChimp and iContact, will provide you with a range of statistics about your e-mail campaigns.
Two that cause considerable confusion are:
Because of the lack of standardisation across all different e-mail systems, the mechanism for tracking how often your e-mail is opened is rather simple.
A very small and invisible graphic image measuring just one pixel square is embedded in the e-mail. Code on the mail servers is able to determine how often this image is downloaded from the server to be viewed within your e-mail. All very straight forward actually.
Whilst it may appear simple and straightforward this is also what makes the results you get quite deceptive and inaccurate. Why would that be? For reasons below we can't rely specifically on the numbers given.
the first thing to remember is that the rates in themselves are of limited value. Comparing rates to previous campaigns or other e-mail marketing Systems is however perfectly valid and encouraged.
The second thing is that you should be primarily looking at the unique open rate not the overall rate. What you should look at is the unique open rate ratio:
Ratio = Unique opens / Total No recipients
The question that is on everybody's lips and unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule to be followed. As you establish credibility with your mail list and subject to the quality of your newsletters your rates will vary. Ideally your rate should improve/increase as time goes by.
As a general rule of thumb, a 20% unique open rate ratio is considered a good start.