Get a higher open rate without trying
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 29, 2007
"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." According to John Lubbock, a man described as an "English banker, politician, naturalist and archaeologist." He wasn't an email marketer (he died in 1913), but his point holds true for open rates.
If you measure open rates, I'm guessing you compare the rates between different emails, and probably track your average rate over some period of time so you can get a feel for how well (or badly) a particular newsletter or campaign fared.
All well and good, but do you ever measure the open rate for a combination of emails? Do you ever ask "how many members of my list opened at least one of the last four emails?"
I never asked the question. Until today. As part of the process of switching list hosts, I decided to delve deeper into subscriber activities. And here's the interesting factlet...
The average open rate for my newsletter is 41.8%. But 64.9% of recipients registered an open for at least one of the last four newsletter issues.
In other words, we forget that it's not the same bunch of people continuously "opening" your emails. The active section of your list might actually be a lot larger than you think.
And different subject lines, offers or content topics might be catching the interest of different subgroups within that list at different times.
If nothing else, this little mathematical exercise really brings home the need to think about your list not as one homogeneous group, but as a collection of different recipient groups whose interests may overlap.
Even without any clever software, simply looking more closely at who opens the emails and what they click on (and when) can give you a whole heap of insight into the makeup of your list. And thus suggest how you might set about creating more targeted emails by splitting that list into groups.
More on email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, list segmentation, email open rates, email marketing metrics, email marketing statistics
If you measure open rates, I'm guessing you compare the rates between different emails, and probably track your average rate over some period of time so you can get a feel for how well (or badly) a particular newsletter or campaign fared.
All well and good, but do you ever measure the open rate for a combination of emails? Do you ever ask "how many members of my list opened at least one of the last four emails?"
I never asked the question. Until today. As part of the process of switching list hosts, I decided to delve deeper into subscriber activities. And here's the interesting factlet...
The average open rate for my newsletter is 41.8%. But 64.9% of recipients registered an open for at least one of the last four newsletter issues.
In other words, we forget that it's not the same bunch of people continuously "opening" your emails. The active section of your list might actually be a lot larger than you think.
And different subject lines, offers or content topics might be catching the interest of different subgroups within that list at different times.
If nothing else, this little mathematical exercise really brings home the need to think about your list not as one homogeneous group, but as a collection of different recipient groups whose interests may overlap.
Even without any clever software, simply looking more closely at who opens the emails and what they click on (and when) can give you a whole heap of insight into the makeup of your list. And thus suggest how you might set about creating more targeted emails by splitting that list into groups.
More on email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, list segmentation, email open rates, email marketing metrics, email marketing statistics
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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