This article is a transcript of a podcast available here:
or on iTunes: https: //itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/le-taux-douverture-dun-email-peut-vous-induire-en-erreur/id1282579751?i=1000392767619&mt=2
In this podcast, we’ll look at how email open rates can mislead you when analyzing your email campaigns.
So, the statistics of an emailing campaign are very important. Analyzing statistics can give you a lot of information. The main one is to see if there are things to improve. For example, if you have a very low open rate, you’re going to try to work on the subject line of your message, on its theme, to encourage web surfers to open your e-mails more.
You have good emailing practices and a decent open rate, but a very low click rate, which means very few people will click on your emails. You’re going to have to work on your message, to see if you can encourage people to visit your website or your landing page. Or you could try working on your calls to action, on the buttons, on anything that will encourage people to go and see your offer. This will also enable you to compare campaigns with each other. When you send campaigns on a regular basis, you have an opening rate that can vary. Variations in open rates between campaigns can give you information on what’s working and what’s not.
So be careful, the open rate may also depend on other factors, such as vacations, like the time of sending. This allows you to test a lot of things. If you’re testing, try to test just one thing at a time. To make sure your test results are easy to measure.
So, overall, opening statistics will help you improve your campaigns, test things and measure the results of your tests. So, the concept of campaign open measurement is quite simple. It’s an invisible image hosted on a server and placed in your messages. So, in general, it’s your email router that manages this, your email campaign router that manages this or your sending server, if you manage it in-house. This invisible image is loaded when the message is read, when the message is opened. Basically, when the user opens the message, this image will be loaded at the same time as the others. When this image is loaded, it sends information to your router’s server, or to your server if you’re sending the e-mails yourself. The information it generally sends is the IP address, your e-mail software or browser if you open it in a web-mail and, of course, the date, time and all the information that can be retrieved from your IP.
So, in general, it’s geographical information that can tell us roughly where you are, in which region.
This poses three major problems. So, measuring the opening of an e-mail is affected by three major problems.
The first is automatic image loading or caching. So, there are messaging environments such as IPhones that automatically load images. This means that if you analyze your campaign opening statistics and manage to isolate the people who opened your messages on IPhone, you’ll see that opening rates are abnormally high compared with other message consultation software. Quite simply, IPhones will upload images to speed up reading speeds. So when you read your e-mails, the images are displayed almost instantaneously. So we’re talking about Apple-mail. For IPphones, we’re talking about Apple mail. So it’s not the case with other software, with other IPhone messaging applications.
We also have a problem with Gmail caching images. Let’s imagine that someone has several computers, well, a phone, a tablet. If they load your message, if they read your message several times, in your statistics, especially your personal statistics, you’ll be able to see the number of times it was opened, and when it was opened. With Gmail, this isn’t possible, because Gmail will cache the images for a certain time on its own servers. And even if the person opens the message several times, he or she will always retrieve the image from Gmail’s cache. This means you’ll only get the information once.
The second big problem is blocked image uploads. Now, I’m sure you’ve all seen that Outlook has a little button for downloading images, and by default all images are blocked. There’s simply a red cross in its place, possibly with alternative text in the image. If loading is blocked, the pixel used to measure opening is also blocked, which poses a problem since the person opens the message, but doesn’t load the pixel, so isn’t detected as an opener. So if the message is very graphic, this isn’t really a problem since people are used to it, they’ll click on “download images” and they’ll be counted as an opener. The problem is that if the message is essentially text, the person will get the “download images” button, but they’ll read the e-mail just fine. They’ll be able to read the message and possibly click on the links, but they’ll never be counted as an opener, simply because they didn’t download the opening pixel. This poses a problem, because we can lose a great deal of open detection, especially on text messages, on messages that look like classic messaging. We can have losses of around 50% when we’re in B-to-B, with a lot of people on Outlook.
Solutions to that! So, there are solutions not to bypass, but to make do with these systems for measuring the opening and statistics of your email campaigns. The first solution is simply to focus on click statistics. Action rates, in other words. This means precisely measuring clicks and clickers on your campaigns, and especially comparing these between campaigns. In other words, compare the volume of clicks generated from campaign to campaign, and this will enable you to measure a more tangible result. That means people who were interested enough in your message, who went through the whole process to get to your site, to follow a link that was in your message.
At the same time, you need to accurately measure the sources of traffic to your site or landing page, so you know where the conversions are coming from. If you’re doing more than one thing, make sure you ask yourself the question of whether you really know where the conversions are coming from. If you’re doing email marketing, if you’re doing adwords, if you’re doing Facebook, you can also advertise on Linkedin… I mean, there are lots of ways of promoting. Ideally, you need to know exactly what each source of traffic brings in. Ideally, you should be able to put a price tag on each transformation and know exactly where it comes from, so you can measure the return on investment of each communication channel. In general, mailings are well placed, but it’s better not to run email campaigns blindly; it’s absolutely better to measure everything. This can be relatively simple, thanks to Google analytics and all the click measurement systems. There are link generator systems that make it very easy to measure the traffic generated by different sources. All you have to do is generate a different link for each channel, and you’ll have the volume of traffic for each source. So, there are paid systems, like ClickMeter, and there are free systems. There’s bit.ly, which does it very well and already provides a lot of information, i.e. you can create short links, measure the volume of traffic on each link and have this with a notion of date. So you can already get a lot of information free of charge.
Finally, you have to try to put all the chances on your side. When you send an e-mail, whether it’s opened or not – well, if the e-mail is opened, if the opening is detected – behind it lies a black box. This means that you know the message has been opened, but you don’t know the condition under which it was opened. Does this mean that the person was able to read it, or that the images were not loaded? Did the e-mail display correctly, or was it completely unstructured? And more generally, you know the message was opened, but you don’t know if it was read, let alone understood.
So, ideally, you want to make the most of your chances and use messages that are relatively short, relatively intelligible, and that make you want to be read. And also to have messages that are well presented and that display as well as possible on each messaging environment. To achieve this, we generally use a responsive editor. So, it’s an editor that lets you create relatively fascinating messages, a bit like…not really like in Word, but more like in DTP, meaning with drag and drop. It lets you create messages without any computer knowledge. That’s all there is to it. Secondly, it guarantees that if you design your message in these responsive editors, they’ll be displayed perfectly. Whether on a computer, IPhone or tablet, and whatever the environment, without you having to test tons of different environments.
So, there are several responsives editors on the market. On the Ediware platform, we have one that’s relatively simple and, above all, very effective. It allows you to go very far and really get the layouts you want. We use it to integrate layouts supplied by agencies.
So, I’d like to invite you to try out our emailing platform. I’ve included the link in the description of this podcast. I also invite you to subscribe to my podcast to receive future episodes.
