Does poor design help your open rate?

Here are three different emails, all with the same content from the same sender.

Email 1 is largely image-based. Take away the images and you really can't get much out of the email at all. So if a recipient has image blocking in place, they don't see anything worth further investigation. Most delete or ignore the email.

Email 2 is designed according to all the best practices out there. Even when images are blocked, you can still read the email fine and get all that you need out of it. The recipients pay attention to its content.

Email 3 is designed OK. There's one annoying graphic messing the display up a little, but the recipient can see what's in the email. So while some are put off by the design quirk, others click on whatever link is necessary to allow images to download, as they're intrigued by the content revealed so far.

Result:

Email 1 (worst design) gets no readers and low open rates
Email 2 (best design) gets lots of readers and good open rates
Email 3 (OK design) gets fewer readers than email 2, but higher open rates.

Does this really happen? Probably not, but who knows? It's just interesting to think a little laterally about email report stats sometimes.

More on open rates and statistics | Tags: email marketing statistics, email open rates

Permalink | June 07, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
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