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.
If you are a high volume sender, and you want some insight into what the people on the end of the Gmail addresses to which you send are doing (and you should), then it's a really good idea to sign up for Google's Gmail Postmaster Tools. Here's how (and also where to find the Gmail Postmaster Tools dashboard).
We've talked before about things that can artificially supress open rates, and the dangers inherent in not being aware of the issues. This was brought home today by a colleague, who writes about an experience they had with being dropped from a mailing list that they read regularly because they read in "no images" mode, causing the sender to assume that they weren't reading their mailings.
Increasing email deliverability 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.
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 reptutation to previously unheard of heights. And, as we've mentioned before, open rates are becoming increasingly important. That is because ISPs look at your open rates to see if people are really interested in receiving and reading your email. So I got to thinking about things that can artificially suppress your open rates.
