Why Your Open Rate Is Shrinking (It’s Not What You Think…)
By Anna Johnson on July 7th, 2008Matt Bacak recently wrote a blog post in which, among other things, he gave some suggestions for how to check whether and why your emails may not be getting through to (or appealing to) your list…
Among other things, Matt mentioned that if you send HTML emails, the “open” rate will give you an indication of how many people opened – and read – your email.
Or will it?
An “open” is recorded when a single pixel image contained within an HTML email is downloaded by your email client. Years ago, when an HTML email arrived in your email inbox, your email client usually automatically downloaded all the code in the email, including the images. And ta-da! the email was recorded as having been opened.
Nowadays, however, many, if not most, email clients do NOT automatically download images. For example, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird v.2, all require you to click a button, right-click, or take some other specific action before any images will be downloaded. And if you don’t take such action… the images won’t be downloaded… and the email will not be recorded as having been opened.
But here’s the thing… it’s unlikely that many people – people who do in fact, read your email – actually click that “load images” button, or right-click, or do whatever else is required for their email client to download the relevant images. They are more likely to simply start reading without taking such action. Furthermore, the LESS image intensive the email is… the LESS likely your readers are to activate images. That’s simply because the email doesn’t look like it’s “missing” anything.
Indeed, according to MarketingSherpa, there has been a 5-year decline in open rates for business-to-business email – from 39 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2008.
While the MarketingSherpa folks attribute some of this decline to people simply opening and reading fewer emails, they also suggest that the decline is due to how later versions of email clients handle images i.e. by requiring users to pro- actively request images to be downloaded.
And as further evidence that the open rate may have more to do with the configuration of most email clients rather than recipients’ reading habits, MarketingSherpa notes that in the case of their “Chart of the Week” email newsletter – where the main content IS an image, and there is a clear incentive for readers to enable images – the open rate has been as high as 70 percent.
In summary, the open rate has become increasingly questionable as an indicator of the degree to which your emails are read by your subscribers.
It’s not only questionable as an “absolute” statistic, but it’s also limited as a “trend” statistic. In other words, while some statistics can still be useful in terms of how they are changing, any change in your open rate may be of limited value – affected, as it is, by the image content in question.
If your image content doesn’t really change from week to week, then changes in your open rate over short time frames – from day to day, or from week to week – may be meaningful. But such changes are probably not so meaningful over longer periods, during which more subscribers may be switching to newer email clients.
Looks like it’s back to clickthrough rates and other most-desired-actions (MDAs) as our best measure of email responsiveness…
Sources: MarketingSherpa, “New Chart: Why Marketers Should Think Twice Before Changing Email Based on Open Rates”, MarketingSherpa, June 24, 2008, Matt Bacak, “How to measure if your emails are getting through to your list”, June 29
