I'm sure you've heard the opinions already: Open rate tracking is absolutely useless. Open rates are a garbage metric. Open triggers attract only bots talking to other bots, retrieving an image to cache it. They're not proof of human interaction. You're an idiot if you rely on them to be accurate records of human interaction with your email messages.
I mean, you're not wrong, Walter. The honest truth is that open tracking truly is nowhere near as accurate as it was in years past. Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) artificially inflates open rates, meaning it's not really safe to use opens at the individual recipient level as a measuring criteria when deciding where to route a recipient in a decision tree in marketing automation. You're going to get told that a bunch of people opened that message, when in fact only some of them did.
Think of an "artificially inflated open rate" like this: Visualize your email campaign as a glass of water. If you've got a 60% open rate, then the glass is 60% full of water. You might think that this means that 60% of the recipients read your email. It does not. The truth is that some percentage of that 60% read your email. You can't tell exactly how many. Maybe half? Maybe more, maybe less. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 60% of that 60% actually read your email, meaning your actual open rate would be 36%.
Is this useless? The inaccuracy isn't great when looking at a single snapshot. But compare the stats over time (like I do here for the Spam Resource newsletter). Look at them week-by-week or month-over-month. Are they trending up? Are they trending down? If heading upward, you're likely gaining audience interest. And what if your open rate drops off a cliff? It's a feedback mechanism that is warning you that your email is probably now going to the spam folder in one or more destinations. That's a great starting point for future troubleshooting.
Thus, I make the case here that yes, as long as you recognize and be aware of their limitations, open rate tracking is still a very valuable metric to track.
Open (and click) tracking are still a sender's best friend when it comes to trimming your list to boost engagement, too. Even though this data isn't perfect, it's still useful to use for identification of subscribers who aren't engaging at all. The "no activity" segment will be smaller than it would have been in years past; as some of those dead subscribers might be falsely reported as opening emails, but it's still the right place to start when it comes to identifying which subscribers to suppress and eventually retire, as part of your lifecycle management process.
Mailbox providers generally speaking know which email messages you're interacting with. They can tell who clicks where in their user interface. Gmail can tell when you're interested in a given sender, regardless of what you, or your email sending platform, is doing with open tracking. And they're likely tracking it with better accuracy than you are. Nonetheless, don't give up on your platform's open tracking JUST yet.
Let's just be real about it: While it still has uses, it has limitations, too.
I'm sure you've heard the opinions already: Open rate tracking is absolutely useless. Open rates are a garbage metric. Open triggers attract only bots talking to other bots, retrieving an image to cache it. They're not proof of human interaction. You're an idiot if you rely on them to be accurate records of human interaction with your email messages.
I mean, you're not wrong, Walter. The honest truth is that open tracking truly is nowhere near as accurate as it was in years past. Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) artificially inflates open rates, meaning it's not really safe to use opens at the individual recipient level as a measuring criteria when deciding where to route a recipient in a decision tree in marketing automation. You're going to get told that a bunch of people opened that message, when in fact only some of them did.
Think of an "artificially inflated open rate" like this: Visualize your email campaign as a glass of water. If you've got a 60% open rate, then the glass is 60% full of water. You might think that this means that 60% of the recipients read your email. It does not. The truth is that some percentage of that 60% read your email. You can't tell exactly how many. Maybe half? Maybe more, maybe less. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 60% of that 60% actually read your email, meaning your actual open rate would be 36%.
Is this useless? The inaccuracy isn't great when looking at a single snapshot. But compare the stats over time (like I do here for the Spam Resource newsletter). Look at them week-by-week or month-over-month. Are they trending up? Are they trending down? If heading upward, you're likely gaining audience interest. And what if your open rate drops off a cliff? It's a feedback mechanism that is warning you that your email is probably now going to the spam folder in one or more destinations. That's a great starting point for future troubleshooting.
Thus, I make the case here that yes, as long as you recognize and be aware of their limitations, open rate tracking is still a very valuable metric to track.
Open (and click) tracking are still a sender's best friend when it comes to trimming your list to boost engagement, too. Even though this data isn't perfect, it's still useful to use for identification of subscribers who aren't engaging at all. The "no activity" segment will be smaller than it would have been in years past; as some of those dead subscribers might be falsely reported as opening emails, but it's still the right place to start when it comes to identifying which subscribers to suppress and eventually retire, as part of your lifecycle management process.
Mailbox providers generally speaking know which email messages you're interacting with. They can tell who clicks where in their user interface. Gmail can tell when you're interested in a given sender, regardless of what you, or your email sending platform, is doing with open tracking. And they're likely tracking it with better accuracy than you are. Nonetheless, don't give up on your platform's open tracking JUST yet.
Let's just be real about it: While it still has uses, it has limitations, too.
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