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September 02 2008
Email click-throughs are up — but research confirms open rate metric no longer works
A new report finds that broadcast email open rates are falling while click-throughs are on the up, confirming what many email marketers have long suspected: Measuring open rate with a 'web beacon' is no longer effective
Open rates are no longer a reliable measure of whether someone has read an email or not, and marketers must use alternative methods to track the success of their email campaigns, new research by a leading email marketing company has found.
But Epsilon International's latest 'Dreammail Trends and Benchmarks' report also reveals that while recorded open rates for the UK fell by 14.8% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2008, click-through rates actually showed a dramatic improvement, up from 7.9% a year ago to 8.8% for Q1 2008, an increase of 11.4%.
Ian Hitt, Epsilon's managing director, sums up the problem: "It has become increasingly difficult to track open rates accurately, because of anti-spam measures taken by ISPs, ESPs and even in some email software packages on PCs. Open rates are tracked using single pixel images embedded in emails; unfortunately, more and more emails are being delivered with images suppressed, and when that happens, the tracking pixel won't work unless the customer actively chooses to display pictures."
This means that, while customers may be reading just as many emails as before, the accuracy of the tracking mechanism can no longer be relied upon.
Epsilon says its research suggests open rates are becoming obsolete as an indicator of the success of a campaign, but increasingly marketers recognise this and are shifting to click-through rates to measure campaign effectiveness. The 11.4% increase in click-through rates shows that marketers are getting better at targeting their emails and tailoring them to the individual recipient.
Hitt says: "Irrelevancy is the new spam, and our clients at least have taken this on board and are using increasingly sophisticated data analysis and segmentation to make emails more relevant."
by Sarah Clark (Web Editor)
Increasing Your Clickthrough Rates
To engage recipients, text should automatically be displayed; to do this text should be displayed as text and not as an image. This text needs to be short, catchy and easily read. Once the recipient’s interest is held, they will continue to download images or visit the website to learn more.
Ensuring the text is readable in an email will also benefit recipients who read them through mobile devices such as BlackBerrys. With more and more emails being read on the move it is critical to consider this when designing an email campaign.
To discuss this in more detail please drop me a line at info@e-inbusiness.co.uk.
Rose Sudlow
Email Marketing Manager
e-inbusiness
Image suppression is the norm
To avoid triggering malicious email content, clients such as Outlook 2007 have actually moved backwards in functionality (using Word to display emails instead of Internet Explorer).
In short, open rate tracking is dead - long live the click-through!