April 30, 2008 
Email open rates seem to have plummeted lately.
Despite very optimistic posts about high open rates in various forums, I notice a more serious tendency that open rates are rather low.
I see it happen too. Do you?
Possible causes are the more intensive use of other ways of communicating with your subscribers, like Twitter, Facebook and many other social networking sites. Your subscribers may very well be too busy using these connections, so there's little time left to read emails. Or there's no need to read them, since people already discovered about your topics at the social sites.
Of course the open rates depend on a lot of variables.
I should emphasize that 'open rates' are more of an indicator than an exact figure, because they are calculated by adding a little graphic in your emails that tallies a tracker if you open the email.
Maybe your subscribers have the 'show images' feature off in their email clients. Also, major ISPs and online email clients often disable images by default. That makes open rates an inaccurate metric.
The only way to make sure someone has opened your email is when they click a link that you can see in your stats. But then you're not testing open rates but click-throughs, another metric. Which isn't bad at all, because they indicate that the reader took the action you wanted her to take.
One of the first things you should do is compare your open rates with those of the industry you're in, so you know if your rates are in line with that.
Another huge factor to get your emails opened is the subject line that you use in your emails.
I'm always testing them and free does work here.
But you don't want to give away everything. Therefore you have to come up with great subject lines. Personally I hate using 'hype' subject lines, but creating curiosity is a good strategy.
Creating a relationship with your subscribers is important too. Therefore you need to write great email follow up series.
Depending on the niche you're in, personalization may help too.
I assume that your content doesn't suck, but sometimes your content, although very nice, isn't relevant to your recipients. Therefore you should always make sure that you qualify your subscribers upfront and tell them exactly what they can expect from you and how often.
Another striking fact is, that those who DO open your emails, almost always seem to be the same subscribers. These are the raving fans that want to read whatever it is you're writing.
Here's an example posted by my good friend Willie Crawford at his private Internet Marketing Inner Circle forum:
While talking to several very successful email marketers, in the hallways outside the room at Big Seminar last night, one said something that surprised me, but shouldn't have.That's food for more thought, isn't it? Like Willie says: 'how can we increase the number of people opening our emails'?
She said that when she tracked her email open rates and WHO opened her emails, she saw that the very same people opened her emails issue after issue... email after email.
So if her email open rate is say 10%, then it's the SAME 10% of the people on her list that opens her email issue after issue, with the other 90% largely ignoring her emails.
It's that handful of raving fans that open ever issue.
It's those people that come up to you at seminars and tell you that they've been on your list for YEARS that open every issue.
I had never really reflected upon that topic but that brought up a lot of other questions, such as how do we increase that number... or how do we know what it is that gets a person in that group in the first place.
Like most things in Internet marketing, the 80/20 rule definitely applies to your email newsletter subscribers.
Willie
Yet another very interesting question, and maybe a better one, is:
If you never open my emails, then why are you on my list?
I saw Paul Myers prune his list last month, using this kind of question. He wrote:
If this newsletter is useful to you at all, read the whole thing. Seriously. "Do It, or Unsubscribe"That made a lot of sense to me.
I've always wondered why someone subscribes to a newsletter and have it clutter their email boxes, never opening one issue. It's beyond me.
So, if you don't read my email messages, by all means, unsubscribe. Each email I send out has an unsubscribe link. Feel free to use it.
Thus we can concentrate on those who DO open emails. And that will probably lead to more valuable content, because these people can tell you what they really want from you. Just ask.
Finally, while email open rates can be a useful indicator, it's more complicated to discover WHO is opening your emails.
It can be done by adding a link including your subscriber's email address in your message that sends your readers over to a page on your server, where you tally the opens from that email address.
Of course it requires a script that does the recognition of the email address, tallies it and store it in a database.
We discussed that matter in The Internet Marketing Inner Circle and one of the members wrote that script. For members only, sorry. Maybe another reason to click that link and become a member too?
Wishing you success,
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