Another example why you just can’t trust your open rates

Remember when I was talking about the most important email metric?

You can understand how open rates and click rates shouldn’t be given that much importance.

I’ll give you another example why you just can’t trust your open rates.

I did a reactivation campaign to my list yesterday.

As I’m sending emails so often, I have to watch for my deliverability numbers and I also don’t want to overload someone’s inbox if they don’t read my emails.

So I segmented out everyone who hasn’t opened any of my last 20ish emails.

Some people would just remove this segment from the list immediately, but I asked from these subscribers to click a link in email if they still want to receive my emails.

Because I’ve seen it so many times – open rates aren’t always correct and don’t get tracked properly.

And I didn’t just get clicks from that segmented list, I’ve received a number of replies as well.

Imagine if I just removed these subscribers, because my system said they haven’t opened any email.

Ooops.

Remember, always do a reactivation campaign when you do some housework on your list.

I’ll explain why exactly open rates cannot be a reliable metric:

Some email clients don’t load images when the email gets opened.

And when the images don’t load, the tracking pixel doesn’t load, so your system cannot recognize the email has been opened.

In any case, don’t trust the open rate.

If you feel like your open rates are on the lower end, know that a lot more people than you think have opened your email.

Check your sales, if they are doing good, your email is doing good.

But if the sales aren’t doing good, you need to do something else – book a call.

Cheers,
Zoran

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