A while back, my friend, computer scientist (a for-real scientist, doesn’t just play one on the Internet) Jim Yaghi and I were talking about open rates.
And, how they are almost pointless to track these days.
Why pointless?
Many reasons.
One, Android phones.
They have HTML turned off by default.
Your little snowflake emails aren’t being tracked.
Another reason?
Jon McCulloch was telling me how Gmail now does something to grab images once and isolate them from the server hosting them – meaning open rate measuring is totally out of whack.
(This one was new to me, but explains a LOT.)
Another?
I’ll let Jim Yaghi take this one:
“Ben one more reason to ignore open and click rates is that when you email daily they naturally trend down and give you a true reflection of your actual readership. This may be depressing. But is actually good news. When you do intermittent emails you get high opens after absence because people are like who the ___ is this clown!? They open to see then are reminded and stop opening the rest of your emails. But the people reading all your daily emails are your true blue loyalists and their numbers are usually a fraction of your entire list. They are also your buyers. I find my steady open numbers (not rate) on regular emails is also the total number of customers in every product I launch”
I have found the same.
I don’t write for “opens.”
I write for sales.
Reminds me of the Email Players subscriber who made his client (using my methods) tons of sales last December in a month where they hardly get any, but was worried about only getting a 9% open rate…
Anyway, do what you want with this info.
I fully realize there are many email gurus who disagree with this.
Maybe, even would call me irresponsible.
(As some prominent guru apparently did once about this.)
But, they’re wrong.
And that’s okay.
After all, it’s not against the law for them to be wrong…
Anyway, to learn how to write emails that make sales without wasting your life tracking metrics that aren’t accurate due to the technology of our times, check out my “Email Players” newsletter.
It ain’t cheap.
And it ain’t for people looking for “sexy.”
I am all about fundamentals.
And, going *deep* into those fundamentals.
Here’s where to subscribe:
Ben Settle
