An Email Marketing Glossary For Beginners And Experts Alike Part 13

May 20, 2010

Also, some people have setup their email software to display text based messages only, especially if they’re using a Blackberry for receiving messages.  So if you don’t send a text-based equivalent of your email along your email may come up as blank or get outright rejected by their PDA.  Mailing lists and forums often insist that all posts sent to them via email be made in plain-text for all the above reasons.  

Open Rate – this is the number or % of recipients that have opened your emails.  Your email service provider provides live tracking for this including the email addresses of which people have done what with your email.  This reporting will tell you which of your recipients have opened your email and how many times they’ve opened it.  It’s important to understand what constitutes an ‘open’ within the tracking system your email service provider uses for understanding how your recipients and how the contacts they may have forwarded the email to have engaged it.  There are three actions which can trigger an instance of an email ‘open’ in your campaign reporting:

1)    Email Preview – many email programs (including Microsoft Outlook) provide a preview feature for each email in your inbox.  Rather than just displaying the Sender Name, Subject Line, and Date/Time the email was received, you can setup Outlook to use the email preview mode for displaying the first few lines of the email when the email is in the inbox.  To do this the email software has to look beyond the email header where it gets the most basic info (sender, subject line, date/time) and look at the body of the email to provide the preview.  Most email service providers will count this act of reading the body of the email as an ‘open’ of the email.  So when someone is using email preview every time they re-boot their computer or re-launch their email software the email service provider will count each instance of this as an ‘open’.  So someone may have never even looked at your email, yet they may have multiple opens attributed to them according to your email service provider.  So it’s important to ascertain with your provider if their software can distinguish between email ‘opens’ induced by the preview mode and instances where the user has gone into the email themselves and viewed it.

Filed under: Attracting Buyers/Sellers With Email

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