email open rate

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
The email open rate metric is mostly used by people who send email newsletters. It measures how many people have opened a newsletter.

Years ago you could embed links and pictures into an email and measure the web site hits to track who and how many people opened your newsletter.

In recent years to help protect users from spam mail programs such as Microsoft Outlook block displaying the pictures by default. Several free webmail providers also block images from unknown senders too.
 

VinnyOHare

Valued Member
I get very good open rates. Some of my email newsletters get opened and then a week later the end user opens them again and clicks on to the website. It is a 2 for 1 bonus as I call it.

The trick is to serve up relevant useful content.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Common sense advice to include useful content. You got me to check the Email Questions monthly newsletter settings and I found a few changes that I could make. Instead of including the latest threads from the announcements forums it makes more sense to include the latest Email Article for example http://www.emailquestions.com/email-articles/2569-top-5-tips-prevent-your-email-getting-hacked.html. I added a couple more of the popular threads and doubled up the latest threads. The latest article up top, and a nice layout for the rest that presents well.

:thanks:
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
I used to do that. The monthly newsletter here is powered by GAZ. (Thanks Big Dan) Members can pick between HTML / Plain Text or choose not to receive the newsletter at all. I think the HTML version looks nice in the webmail provider inboxes like Yahoo and Gmail. The less frequent "we miss you" style email is every 90 days instead of monthly and sends out as plain text with a couple links.
 

VinnyOHare

Valued Member
I learned a long time ago that newsletters looking nice don't perform as well for me and since they are html based they get caught in spam filters more.

Why take that chance just to look pretty, pretty doesn't pay the bills action to the newsletter does :)
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
I'll force everyone to plain text and send the next issue in 2 weeks.

I think by doing that I may lose my tracking info but I'll try it out and see what happens.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
That doesn't appear to have helped. I'm still under the average 25% ish that some consider the average open rate. My timing is probably off. I wonder if I can force my newsletter to go out around 7:00pm PM on a prime time week night. That probably means I'll need to move from automated to manual sending of the monthly newsletter. The image/link tracking is likely getting blocked by some providers too so I suppose a number that's a little under what others such as Mail Chimp publish as an average then I'm not doing too bad.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
I suppose one way to look at it is to try and do to others the same as what has worked on me. For example, to get your "2 for 1" bonus as you called it, the Google AdSense newsletter has so many tips I'll check a couple, star it in my Gmail, and then get back to it over the weekend when I have more time to skim over the rest of the content.
 
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