Why do you call a bad email marketer when you’re having trouble opening a pickle jar?
Because they’re obsessed with constantly improving their open rates.
*cue the laughing track*
Jokes aside, this is something I see all the time. Some wannabe “email expert” who’s barely making any money with his own list, or worse yet, he doesn’t even own his own list and only works for other people. And one by one they all obsess over open rates.
Which, everyone who’s actually any good at their job in the industry knows, is nothing short of absolutely idiotic.
Not only are open rates a vanity metric. (why care about them instead of your actual sales?)
But they’re also widely inaccurate.
Many phones, most Androids and lately iPhones as well, have images turned off by default when browsing their emails. And as you may (or may not) know, those images (called tracking pixels) are used to determine whether or not your email has been opened in the first place.
No images = no ‘open’.
An example:
I’ve regularly seen it happen in my list where someone buys one of my products, but when I go and look at their recent email interactivity it says they’ve only opened 3 emails out of the total 152 I’ve sent them.
Incidentally, they’re click rate is 100%.
I shouldn’t have to spell it out. But this means that those three emails were only identified as being ‘opened’ because they clicked the link. All those other emails? They probably read them as well. They simply couldn’t be tracked.
It works the other way around as well.
Some services make it seem as if every email is being read simply because of how their spam detection works (outlook is famous for this). This means that a subscriber could’ve read 0 emails of yours, but they’d still show up with a 100% open rate.
And now when you introduce the fact that people might read their emails on different phones, tablets, computers, or whatever else they have, whenever they’re in a different environment, then there’s simply no knowing what your supposed open rate is actually showing you.
But I get it.
The thing is, this simply doesn’t get talked about enough.
People (who have no idea what they’re doing) are still recommending others (who also have no idea what they’re doing, and even have less of an idea of who to listen to for advice) to re-send to unopens, segment your list based on open rates, or worst of all: implement a re-activation campaign where you send a “do you still want to stay on this list?” email to people who haven’t opened your mail in a while, only to remove them if they don’t click a link (spoiler: some of those people could very well be your best customers).
All awful advice and none of which will actually help you get more sales and earn more money—which I’d assume should be everyone’s actual end goal.
So now the choice is yours:
You can either continue listening to your favorite email marketing “expert” who has no idea what they’re doing and obsesses over open rates.
Or you can learn what actually matters while writing emails, how to really build a list of qualified customers, people who love to buy from you no matter what, and how to write emails that entertain people for weeks, months, and even years to come, helping you make sales day after day.
And luckily one way to do so is by getting my Email Extraordinaire course.
You won’t find me bitching or whining about stuff that doesn’t matter such as open rates or segmenting your list.
Only cold hard facts, proven systems, and the best-performing money-making principles to help you make sales and keep your readers reading day after day.
Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.gumroad.com/l/EE