This week DoubleClick released its Email Marketing Trends Report covering Q2 2005 (press release). The report concludes three forces are pushing down open rates, which have declined 23.6% from 36% in Q2’04 to 27.5% in Q2’05: ISP technology changes, aging lists and changing consumer behaviour.
ISP Technology Changes
Most readers here will know that changes to settings in Outlook and AOL 9.0, and the default in Gmail, have greatly impacted open rates. Open rate tracking often relies on image data and with these email clients defaulting to not display images, that information can not be tracked by email marketing software. Many marketers would argue that open rates are not reliable and not an effective way of measuring campaign success. DoubleClick’s research suggests that what has most influenced open rates is changes in new versions of Outlook, indicating as many as 47% of users use their preview pane to review email.
Author: One Degree
It seems like it’s been eons, but a little less than a month ago I found out that I got a dream job at an “online start up”:http://www.ojos-inc.com in Silicon Valley. Since then, I really haven’t had the chance to stop and think about what that means. So, when Ken suggested I put together a short post on the difference between working in corporate Canada and being at ground zero of the online world, I finally stopped and reflected.
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“Google Blog Search”:http://blogsearch.google.com/ is now live.
I’m still fiddling around and trying to figure out if a few issues with our posts in Google Blog Search are our problem or Googles. Like why Google thinks “Bill Sweetman”:http://www.onedegree.ca/contributors/bill_sweetman wrote all our posts for example.