1. The open rate should have 0 difference between various email senders. The only difference will be in deliverability, but no provider will give you those numbers. How do I know? Because I called them and asked. They say it’s a secret, or they dont know (probably the latter). The only way you would be able to get an accurate number is to get accounts with hotmail, aol, gmail, comcast, qwest, and other major isp’s; and then see how many reach the inboxes on various campaigns.

2. 87% seems a bit high these days as most every email client I encounter blocks images by default. You know, when it asks you something like “would you like to enable images/content in this email”? You see the image is a single pixel image that is downloaded from the senders server. That server can then see the email account requesting it, and therefore validate that in fact that email account is indeed active and opened the email. In teh olden days, it wasn’t a problem to automatically download all images, but spammers began to use it to validate email addresses (clean up their massive lists), so that’s why blocking images by default became standard.

3. All email clients today can read HTML email, and they are easier to read if used properly; therefore make the switch if you haven’t already. A few over-rigorous firewalls may block HTML email, but keep it simple, and it will be very minor cmopared to the benefits of a visually engaging email. Try not to use images a lot. And/or try to get them to go to your website to see an online version of the email as a backup. In some cases, if you are a very respectable brand that sells visual products, you can make the entire newsletter an image, basically forcing the consumer to enable images, thereby getting a better idea of open rates.

Any questions?

Thanks for the clarification. Actually, I wasn’t too sure that my conclusion was scientifically valid so I’m happy you stopped by.

Neil.