What Is Wrong With The Fewer And Fewer Opens These Days?

[jack2007]

It seems my company's newsletter got lower and lower OPEN rates from last week. Does anyone have the same experience? Pllease share your idea!

[ompundit]

I get you sent out your newletter and your open rates have fallen, but you specified a time frame of "last week" and stated the rates got lower and lower, which is two seperate results for the same time frame.

My point being is that to me, I read you sent out multiple emails last week and each time the open rate went lower and lower. So I would say off the bat you have been abusing your email list and are now paying the price.

If this is not the case give more details so we can help you figure out whats really going on.

[Mahriyah]

What day of the week and time are you sending out your newsletter? I agree with ompundit, the users on your email list may feel bombarded if you're sending multiple emails each week.

Has anything else changed since you started receiving lower open rates?

[jack2007]

I am sorry that I didn't express the situation clearly. In fact, we have different projects for different customers and we sent out several campaigns each week. However, each customer just received one email which purposely designed for him/her in one week.

[BeckyW]

If your readers are blocking images in their email software, the message won't register as "opened" even if they opened it. Have your click-throughs dropped off as well?

[4ndr3w]

Critical question: what do you mean by "open rate"? What does your ESP mean by "open rate" - if you use an ESP.

If asked, most people will tell you that open rate is the number of e-mails that were opened by the recipients. The problem is that this isn’t actually true.

An open is counted when a tagged image in an email is rendered by the recipient’s email client. Not all mail clients render images by default, but the emails are still available for the recipient to read. If a user clicks on a link in an email that has not had an image rendered, some ESPs count that as an open as well as a click. In other cases, visiting a link in an email with no image rendered is just a click, no open is recorded.

Open rate is not a measure of how many people opened a mail. It is not a measure of how many people read a mail. It really only records that an image in a particular email is loaded and, sometimes, that a link was clicked on. Open rates can be wildly different depending on how the sender measures opens and how the sender measures sends.

As metrics for email campaigns go, open rate is limited in what it measures about an email campaign. However, as a quick way to measure trending or do head to head comparisons it is a useful metric.

[Logan]

Or it could be something else, as this was posted the friday before easter and less of your typical audience may have been in their email. Track trends over time and consider there may be variables that you are unaware of when you encounter blips. Trends over an extended time period are what matter.

[mattdaily]

Yes, you are right...spam filters get stronger and more people are using socila sites for sending messages

[Samuel Craig]

How many times have you sent an email out to these folks?
How dramatic is the fall off?
How frequently do you send?

These are all going to affect your response. People start to get tired of email they get every week...

[torka]

Beyond that, it's not just how often the email is sent, but what the email says, as well -- and in particular, what the subject line says -- that can affect the open rate over time...

You say they're "purposely designed" for each recipient, but if the subject line and the actual content aren't compelling time after time, sooner or later the recipients will stop reading. And with the flood of incoming email most of us receive on a daily basis, it will probably be sooner rather than later.

Speaking personally, I know there are a whole bunch of newsletters I still receive and (very occasionally) open when the subject line seems especially interesting. For the most part, though, I just toss them unopened because I simply don't have enough time to spend reading uninteresting emails. And my experience with these has been that they aren't consistently entertaining/useful enough to bother with every time.

Targeting an email to what you perceive as a person's "interests" is not the same as making that email truly compelling. I'm not saying that's the problem in this case, just that the question needs to be asked.

--Torka