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.
It's really important to understand what is a click-through rate, what is a good click-through rate, and why you need to monitor your own email click-through rate. Click-through rate and open rate are the two metrics that are the twin canaries in the coal mine when it comes to email deliverability. When you monitor these two rates, you can be tipped off to deliverability issues that are brewing and nip them in the bud before they become serious problems, such as your email going to the spam folder or being rejected or blocked.
Do you have any idea what your open rates are for your mailings? If your answer is "no", well, you should, and we're going to tell you why. If your answer is "what's an open rate?", then, well, you probably have bigger problems than just not knowing what an open rate is, let alone what yours are. Either way, you could be (in fact likely are) having serious email deliverability problems, and have no idea.
Are you doing email delivery monitoring? We sure hope so, because inbox delivery monitoring is one of two critical ways to keep your finger on the pulse of your email campaigns (the other is tracking your open rates and click-through rates, which is another discussion for another day).
As we've talked about at length before, web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, take into account the open rates and click-through rates associated with the email that you send to their users. If your rates are too low, they will start putting your email in the spam folder. But in addition to the obvious concerns and issues related to open rates, there is another aspect of these web-based mail providers - and Gmail in particular - to which nobody gives a thought, even though it is quietly killing email deliverability for countless legitimate, ethical email marketers and other email senders.
Our data suggests that a complaint rate of more than even 1 in 10,000 (.01%) can cause problems. This may happen as a consequence of direct actions by the ISP or as a reflection of something else. You may see issues mainly because you will be reported by recipients in a sustained trend.
Email marketing firm Silverpop, released study results about the efficacy of email campaigns. Silverpop took a look at emails that were sent during 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. The email messages analyzed were sent by Silverpop's clients, by over 1,100 different brands. They looked at several different types of email messages, including transactional messages, promotional emails, content-based newsletters, and notifications. The data that they found pertaining to click-through rates, open rates and unsusubscribe rates were very informative.
For those of you who have read the intro of our Email Deliverability Handbook, you know […]
We are sorry to see Delivery Monitor close - they have long been a respected partner for our ISIPP SuretyMail Email Accreditation service. However, our customers who have been using Delivery Monitor do not have to worry, as we are already providing an alternative to Delivery Monitor, with services which are similar in nature when it comes to the essential basics: is your email getting into the inbox, or going to the junk folder? Beyond that, if your mail is going to the junk folder, we tell you why and, most importantly, how to fix it.
The results of a recent survey released by eROI show that a shocking almost 20% of email marketers don't bother to track their open rates and click-through rates (CTR).
