People make email WAY too complicated.
Especially people obsessing over open rates, click thru rates, opt out rates and deliverability rates.
You’ll waste your life doing that.
Here are a few reasons why:
1. Yes, there are *some* things you can do for deliverability.
But, delivery is mostly outside your control — dependent on your auto-responder’s relationship with ISP’s, staying off black lists, deleting accounts that get lots of spam complaints (when other people using your auto-responder get high spam complaints, it can hurt your deliverability), etc.
2. If you take the long view today’s open rates are irrelevant.
Why?
Because silly, you can come at them again tomorrow…
3. Open rates are hard to accurately track.
Especially with smart phones which don’t usually have images turned on (and thus, aren’t tracking opens).
4. Higher click-thrus don’t necessarily equal higher sales.
Nor do higher open rates.
Spammers sometimes get huge click-thrus and opens, but few sales. A guy once asked me how I track my ROI if I don’t track opens.
Which was odd.
I mean, how would you track ROI with opens?
Opens aren’t sales…
So, what’s the solution to all this?
It’s simple:
Instead of obsessing over things mostly outside your control like better email deliverability… focus on writing better emails.
Building a *responsive* list.
And, yes, learning to sell.
(In a way people like buying from).
You’ll make more sales.
Waste less time.
And there will be peace in your world…
Speaking of peace:
The next “Email Players” issue delves deep into the psychology behind our Nobel Peace Prize winning president’s 2012 campaign fundraising emails. (Most of the $690 million online donations were via email, NOT social media.)
Lots of cool insights.
And, lots of profitable insights, too.
Subscribe in time here:
Ben Settle
