Computer scientist explains foolishness of obsessing over email open rates

Published: Mon, 02/18/19

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, he talked about Android phones.

They have HTML turned off by default.

Which means, many of your precious opens aren’t being properly tracked anyway.

(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. I don't know if this is still the case, but would not be surprising at all if it was.

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”

This is why I don’t write for “opens.”

I write for sales.

Reminds me of the Email Players subscriber who subscribed, then made his client the most sales they'd ever gotten in a month where they hardly get any sales, but told me he was worried about only getting a 9% open rate.

The irony writes itself...

Anyway, do what you want with this info.

I fully realize there are many IM guru-types who disagree with this.

Tracking opens has its uses, I suppose.

But, it seems pointless to obsess over them to the point so many do.

Anyway, to learn how to write emails that put cold, hard rubles in your bank account, without wasting your life tracking soft metrics that have about as much to do with your sales as your last Pacman score, check out my “Email Players” newsletter.

Here’s where to subscribe:

http://www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle