Re: Opt-in Emails Opened & CTR

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Thu 09 Nov 2000 15:50:39 -0500

BOB FIDDLER <bobfi_at_bellatlantic.net> WROTE:
> We recently began executing an opt-in email campaign
> for a small b2b client using a reputable third-party
> opt-in email vendor. We were surprised when we got the
> first two day's results and saw that of 5000 double
> opt-in emails sent, only 965 were opened--less than
> 20%! I've done a fair amount of research and have not
> seen any average figures for emails getting opened;
> does anyone know if 20% is unusual. Seems awfully low
> to me. Is there a norm? Of those that were opened, we
> saw about a 10% CTR, which is encouraging, but when you
> factor in the rate of opening the total CTR is under
> 2%--not good at all. Obviously we can look more closely
> at the lists we bought, but beyond that does anyone
> have any wisdom to dispense? Is this story unusual? Are
> opt-in recipients already beginning to ignore their
> email en masse?

I don't see how the software can be determining who
opened the email, unless you're including attachments
or some sort of java applets that may be triggering
filters. There is an old protocol, return-receipt,
which was once commonly used to indicate when people
had opened a message, but supposedly it's no longer
being honored by many email clients and may even be
stripped by some relaying services (or possibly by the
mail servers which administer the email addresses).

And the only comment I can make as an opt-in recipient
myself is that I often let my email sit for days, or
even weeks. I get several hundred messages a day,
some of it from opt-in mailing lists, but mostly from
other sources (and not that many mailing lists, I
might add). I tend to look at email from people I
know first, but even some of them languish.

I suspect the same pattern is true of most people once
they start getting a lot of email. I've also found
that people who use Web-based email tend not to check
it every time they log on to the Internet. You're
lucky if they check it once a day.

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Received on Thu Nov 09 2000 - 14:50:39 CST