Are Your Email Delivery Rates Really That Bad?

So I recently upgraded my Microsoft Office to the most recent version as the previous version of Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) was consistently crashing.

The layout was slightly different, defaulting to the three column approach that many of you are probably so used to by now. One interesting feature I noticed was that images weren't downloaded automatically, even after I had "approved" previous issues of a given newsletter.

Why is this important?

Email service providers, like Constant Contact, provide statistics on how your email campaigns perform, including the all-important how many "opens" you have. The way they measure opens--the number of people who supposedly view your email newsletter after it's been delivered--is by counting the requests for a given one-pixel image that's included in the email.

However, if Entourage or Outlook doesn't download that image, Constant Contact--or your email service provider of choice--doesn't know that the emails been opened.

I had heard for a while--and my own experience backs this up--that as time goes on and your subscriber base grows, your open rate goes down. This has been attributed to subscriber burnout or, if you're using email bait, the chance that some people were interested in the bait, but not your ongoing newsletter.

However, a 3rd variable is the growing sophistication of email programs in blocking images from emails, especially in the default state. Most people don't realize they can change the way a program behaves, or are just not interested in doing so. As a developer, I often leave a program in its default state for a time so I can understand what other people are experiencing.

So, if you've noticed your open rates are going down, don't despair. Some of it may be people upgrading to slightly more functional versions of Microsoft Office.

Rich Brooks
Email Marketing for Small Business

Comments

[Josh Hurley]

One of the tactics to encourage users to download/display pictures is to put part of the mail content into the images. For example, if you have a coupon in your email, put the details in the image, and use the alt tag to display a teaser, e.g. [Coupon]. This assumes the user recognizes the sender, so that the recipient will click the download/display images operation for that email.

BTW, the other negative side-effect of image blocking is the click-through rate will be artificially high because it is a percentage of "received emails" (only ones where the images where downloaded) vs the clicked links. I did read a few years ago that companies such as Constant Contact where using other methods in addition to the 1x1 image to track received messages, such as tracking bounced messages. I'm sure the exact algorithm they use to determine delivered messages is proprietary...