What Is An Open Rate

Good thing in emarketing business today is that many people use email marketing as an item in their promotional activities. Many companies publish a company email newsletter in order to stay in touch with their clients and prospects and some other people only advertise in other email newsletters. Everyone have one thing in common ? they want that their email newsletters open as many people as possible. In other words to have a good open ratio?

So what is an open ratio? Open ratio represents the number or percentage of people who actually opened your email newsletters. Yes, you are right. Not everyone will open your email newsletter. In fact, it is often the case that the majority of your subscribers won't open your email newsletter. Sad bad true. If your newsletter has 10,000 subscribers and 4000 subscribers opened your email it means that your open ratio is 40%. This is, by the way, good open ratio according to recent email marketing statistics that show that average open ratio in B2C (Business To Consumer) email newsletter is around 20% and that open ratio is higher (more than 30%) in B2B (Business To Business) email newsletters.

Open ratio is very important because if an advertiser pays that his ad be in front of 10,000 people he wants that nearly 10,000 people really see his ad. Let me put it this way. If you buy a automobile that has a declared speed of 240 kmh you expect that you will be able to drive that fast if you want. Although, I wouldn't suggest you that.

Email publishers count open ratio by embedding a code that will call an image, usually white image in format 1x1 pixels from their server. So every time image is loaded, it means that email newsletter is opened. I said opened, not read. If you want to increase the probability that the open ratio nearly represents the number of people who also read your newsletter you can embed that image source code at the end of your email newsletter. Also, you can write your articles in "teaser" format. "Teaser" format!? You can write first 4-5 sentences of your article and after that write something similar like this:

If you want to read the whole article please visit http://www.yourdomain.com/yourarticle

This way you will know how many people read your article. Of course, if you use some CTR (Click-Thru-Ratio) or web counter software. For click-thru software I would suggest you to use Group Metrics ? http://www.group-metrics.com It is all-in-one package that will also help you to know what is your open ratio, click-thru-ratio, you will be able to creat polls?

You may say that 20-30% is a very low open ratio. However, open ratio is a little bit complicated thing. Why? First of all, many people will open your newsletter but you won't know that. How is that possible? It is very simple. If they read a plain-text version of your email newsletter (they requested to get your email newsletter in that format) so not in HTML format you won't be able to measure your open rate. Also, many people are offline while they read email newsletter or their email clients don't support HTML formats. In these cases, too, you won't know if they opened your email.

In the next article you will read about techniques for improving your open rate.

Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com

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