Computer scientist explains foolishness of obsessing over email open rates

Published: Tue, 02/20/18

A while back, my friend, computer scientist (a for-real scientist, who understands the rigors and discipline it takes to do an actual scientific test, i.e. he doesn’t just play one on the Internet) Jim Yaghi and I were talking about open rates.

And, how they are mostly pointless to track these days.

Why?

Many reasons.

One, Android phones.

They have HTML turned off by default.

Your little snowflake opens aren’t being tracked.

(I hear tell the thunderbird email program for Mac does the same, but have not confirmed...)

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) the most sales they'd ever gotten 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 IM gurus who disagree with this.

Tracking opens has its uses, but not something worth obsessing over in my humble (but accurate) opinion.

Anyway, to learn how to write emails that put cold, hard rubles in your bank account without wasting your life tracking soft metrics that aren’t accurate due to the technology of our times, check out my “Email Players” newsletter.

Here’s where to subscribe:

http://www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle