Open rate patterns - should you care?

It matters whether someone opens your email. But it also matters when they do so.

Reading through the newly-released MailerMailer and Vision 6 metrics reports, both agree that around 75% of people who are going to open an email will do it within the first 24 hours.

Why should such things interest us? Here are a few reasons:

1. By tracking the timing of opens and clicks, you can prepare for the consequences. Can your website / customer service / inventory cope with email-incited peak demand times?

2. Although most responses come quickly, there are still people looking at your email sometime down the road. Vision 6 reports 6% of first opens coming at least 7 days after the initial sendout.

And let's not forget that the first open may be immediate, but people may come back to your emails again much later.

So links and images need to stay live and relevant.

By relevant I mean, for example, if you had a time-limited offer, then the landing page needs to break the bad news gently to latecomers (and similar).

3. If you know most responses take place quickly, you can use that knowledge when testing. A concept explained well by Jeanne Jennings.

4. Knowing how many times a recipient opens your email (repeat opens) is an oft-forgotten measure which reveals its own insights.

5. If you track the speed of opens across emails, you might notice patterns. If people are taking longer and longer to get to your email, what does that tell you? Are they switching off? Do you need to work in some kind of urgency into your emails to ensure apathy doesn't see responses drop?

Any other suggested uses for this kind of data?

More on open rates | Tags: email open rates, email marketing metrics

Permalink | March 14, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
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