Aweber Email Open Rate Stats
If you haven’t already seen this, check it out.
Aweber, a big autoresponder company, have released some very interesting email marketing statistics such as which days do most emails get sent and which days get the highest open rates.
The overall average open rate is an astonishingly small 13%.
Wow. 87% of emails sent from Aweber don’t even get opened.
I wonder what it is for GetResponse… :p
I’ve stuck with plain text emails, which means I can’t determine open rates… but I’m thinking it’s an important metric to track, so I may switch to sending HTML emails.
What do you think?
May 18th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Open rates are only able to be tracked for recipients that have images enabled and are viewing the HTML version of a message. It’s inaccurate to say that “87% of emails don’t get opened” by reversing the 13% number. There’s simply no way to know what percentage fully get opened or not opened. An open rate metric simply gives you a comparison against other campaigns sent around the same timeframe.
May 18th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the clarification. Actually, I wasn’t too sure that my conclusion was scientifically valid so I’m happy you stopped by.
Neil.
September 9th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Neil (and the rest of you),
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?