Email marketer here.<p>Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their increase in open rate.<p>Another thing to note is that most of the big email platforms now offer some kind of automated send-time optimization, which looks at an individual's open behavior over time and adjusts the send time individually for a given campaign to a time that person tends to be most responsive. In Salesforce this is called Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO).<p>STO really only boosts open rates by 5-10% at most on average (i.e., from 20% to 21-22%), which is another reason why I am skeptical of this "trick."
Another way you can probably increase the effectiveness of marketing emails is to send less of them. If you're sending daily emails or worse multiple emails a day, your emails are spam and people will start auto-deleting them. This trains the spam filter to identify them as spam which means you will probably be identified as spam for other users with the same email provider.<p>If you're a clothing store, you can also increase the effectiveness of your marketing emails by only sending emails that are relevant to that customer. If I've never bought children's clothes at your store, that probably means I don't have any kids and am not interested in hearing about a sale on clothes for kids. Likewise, if I only buy men's clothes that means I'm probably not interested in hearing about sales on women's clothes.<p>In the case of Amazon, they have a bad habit of sending marketing emails if you've ever bought anything in a specific category. Buy a vinyl album for somebody as a Christmas gift once? That means you must be interested in hearing about similar vinyl albums on a regular basis.<p>The common thread between those 2 is that retailers collecting data on past customer purchases is a good practice for both the retailer and the customer but only if the data is used intelligently to send relevant marketing emails when they're going to be genuinely of interest to the customer.
Unless you are looking over my shoulder, you won't know if I opened your email. And regardless of whether you are looking over my shoulder or you are instrumenting messages with intrusive surveillance, you're being creepy. Cut it out.
I can't believe people are still sending email marketing. I report spam and unsubscribe on literally anything marketing related even from services I use and all my friends do this as well and have for nearly a decade.
I'm curious. Isn't low open rate pointing to the fact that people don't want to read what you send them? How is this marketing email different from spam?
Off topic rant, but in my personal experience brands destroy more value/goodwill on their email marketing campaigns than any incremental sales they generate.<p>Why even give me the option to not sign up for your email marketing list when I check out if you’re going to spam me anyway?
Will suggest this to my manager, he loves seeing percentages very much. So much in fact that our OKR for next quarter is to boost our email open rate by 50%. That means from 1% to 1.5%.
Genius! I have scheduled emails to be sent exactly 1 day, 2 day... later so that it goes at similar times, never did I think to separate out the time part and generalise it for the user. Blindspot removed, thanks.
I manage an ecom with nearly 50k subscribers. Open rate is dead since the recent IOS update completely skews the numbers, so most of us have switched to click rate.<p>Nonetheless, the strategy discussed in the link sounds pretty interesting. The thought process being people generally check emails around the same time? Might test it out.
> This trick was to start sending the emails at the same hour the user last visited our website.<p>> For example, if a user was last on our website at 3:43pm, then now we send the marketing emails to this user at around 3pm.<p>There’s 0 chance that this has any real effect on the click rate.
If you don’t want to keep track of when your users are visiting your site, you can instead use their time of signup as an approximation when they are likely to be online.