After iOS 15 email marketing was changed forever, and email open rates are no longer important, right? Wrong. Since the moment that iOS 15 was a gleam in Tim Cook's eye, self-styled email marketing experts began advising that you could start ignoring open rates because, and we quote, "they are no longer accurate" and "they are artificially inflated by iOS 15." To paraphrase a beloved children's story, this is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice.
Just what is a good open rate average, and is there an open rate formula? In our world we talk a lot about open rates, and why it's so important to track them (you can read more about the importance of tracking open rates here). While open rate averages vary widely across industries, senders, ESPs, and ISPs, and there is no real open rate formula, a very general rule of thumb is that inbox providers and ISPs like to see a consistent 20% or better open rate in order to keep putting the email that you send flowing into the inbox, and help to avoid your landing in the spam folder. But what is less talked about is what causes failure to opens (FTOs) and how to prevent them.
Did you know that your mailing list's MR is way more important than LS (List Size)? In fact, MR is one of the most important, if not the most important, metric of all. Not familiar with 'MR'? Read on!
If you are already using Google's Gmail Postmaster Tools, guess what! You can share read-only access to this valuable data! (If you aren't already signed up for Gmail Postmaster Tools, see our tutorial on how to sign up for Google's Gmail Postmaster Tools.) There are any number of reasons that you might want to give someone else access to your data; here at SuretyMail we use it to review our customers' inboxing versus spam-foldering at Gmail so that we can help them fix anything that may be causing them to not achieve the best inboxing possible.
While Google's Gmail Feedback Loop (Gmail FBL) is intended primarily for high volume senders and ESPs, Google offers their Google Postmaster Tools (PMT) to everyone. Here are how to sign up for Google Postmaster Tools and the Gmail Feedback Loop. Even without taking advantage of the Gmail FBL (which only provides aggregate information anyway), Google Postmaster Tools give you a great deal of insight into what's going on with the email that you send to Gmail users. This is information you really need to monitor, so it's a really good idea to sign up for the Google Postmaster Tools. Here's how to sign up for Google Postmaster Tools, where to find the Google PMT dashboard, and also how to sign up for the Gmail Feedback Loop if you are a higher volume sender.
We've talked before about the things that can artificially suppress open rates, and the dangers inherent in not being aware of the issues. And of course we've talked about the importance of continuing to monitor your open rates, even after iOS 15, because hey, the inbox providers continue to monitor them. Now we're going to share with you a real-life story about how a business gave a loyal subscriber the boot because that subscriber was reading email without loading images, and so the business assumed they were inactive. Don't make this mistake.
Improving email deliverability rates is both an art and a science, and to really get results you need to have some expertise in both. And of course, that's one of the reasons that many companies pay someone to do it for them, be it an in-house email deliverability expert, an outside company such as ours, or a combination of both. But there are some fairly simple things that you can do on your own to help monitor and improve email deliverability, no experience needed! Here are three things that you can do that can make a big difference to your email deliverability rate, and all they will cost you is your time.
We have officially rolled out our Feedback Loop Reports service today, with its own spiffy section on our website, and we couldn't be prouder.
We're always thinking about ways that we can boost our customers' deliverability and email reputation to previously unheard of heights. And, as we've mentioned recently, open rates are still important, not withstanding what some might say. That's because ISPs and inbox providers still look at your open rates to see if people are really interested in receiving and reading your email.
