Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Open rates are unreliable at best, and totally worthless at worst.

First, what are they and how are they tracked? Open rates are so-called because mailing list providers, publishers, and software developers have coined the term for calculating the amount of "read" emails on a list. In other words, how many people actually got the email, opened it, and... well, at least opened it!

Lots of ways to do it, but probably the most common is a simple graphic (invisible) embedded in the message. The email is opened, the graphic is called, and the logs show a "view." This view is tracked by server log analytics and the total amount of the list is compared with the total tracked views, thus the open rate is achieved.

There are many problems with this. Firstly, ISPs and email providers across the universe have become more restrictive about what they let through, and blackhole lists, authentication, and other strategies apply the first layer of filtering. Second layer filtering may happen on the client side, where either a third-party service, a script for IMAP email, or Eudora's filering tool for POP is employed.

Just an overview - but the summation is: lots of hops along the way to intercept the communication.

What's the problem with the open rate? Briefly:

• Many ISPs and email providers have begun initiating image-blocking within emails. AOL comes to mind, for instance, and there are others.
• There's the issue of users who have configured their email reader to block all images from downloading, even while receiving HTML email and reading it while connected. Since they won't be able to download the image, they won't be ticked in the logs.
• POP users who download email and read it later offline will not be tracked. Being offline is much more infrequent with so much wireless these days, but it does happen. Like on planes. These false negatives aren't tracked.
• And what about Outlook's and Eudora's preview pane feature? A subscriber may never even glance at the email, but if it's loaded into the preview pane it will register a view, and a false positive.
• Plain-text emails aren't trackable, unless specialized software is employed. The techniques involved impinge upon unethical ground, IMO, using header tricks and other nefarious schemes.

I still think open rates can be helpful, though. For instance, using open rates as a general barometer of list health can be beneficial. Just don't put too much reliance in them.