Category: June Macdonald

The Register reports on new graphical spam map from Mailinator.

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.

This week’s Email Insider article proposes replacing use of the unsubscribe rate with a “Disaffection Index” to more accurately reflect how well your email is being received.
For many marketers, the problem with using the Unsubscribe rate as a metric is that many users have come to believe that companies will not actually remove you from their list by using it. They simply delete the message instead and the unsubscribe rate becomes an inaccurate measure of how your message was received.