Sunday, August 7, 2011

The value of an opened email to marketing

Opened email tracking is a standard marketing metric measuring the success of a mass email marketing campaign, tracking whether or not someone opened an email message. The perceived value of tracking opened emails is probably greater than the actual value of the measurement as an indicator of an email message's success. According to Marketing Sherpa's Benchmark 2007 study, there is a slight decrease in companies placing importance on opened email tracking. This may be due to its limited value as a stand-alone metric. The email open rate is calculated as a percentage of the total number of email messages opened and the total number of emails successfully sent. There are several problems with relying on opened tracking rates as a good measurement. All open tracking markers are image based, and many email clients block images by default. Although a message is indicated as an opened email message, it doesn't mean the message was read. If the message preview pane is opened in the email client, it will still register as an open, even if the recipient passes over the email message to go to the next one. Regardless of whether or not someone opens a message, it doesn't really spell success unless other metrics like click through links are also tracked.

Each time an email message is opened, the email tracking image used is called up from the server. The number of opens incremented would add up to the cumulative opened total. If the same person opens the email three times, it may indicate that the message is more valuable, and they return to it frequently. It could also mean they viewed the email in the preview pane, and then opened it fully. Another possibility is that they forwarded the message to someone else, and the person to whom they sent the message opened and read it. If the opened tracking software captures the IP address, it is easy to determine if it was the same person, or if the message was forwarded. These values still don't indicate how successful the overall email message is.
The email open rate is calculated by the number of unique opens divided by the total number of successfully delivered emails. If cumulative opens were used the value would be skewed. If there are any opens recorded for a particular record in a mass email marketing campaign, the number of unique opens is one. Subsequent opens would not count toward the open rate. According to Marketing Sherpa, the largest block of reported open rates lay between 10%-19%, which is down over the previous

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