Why Email Open Rates Are A Crappy Metric

For years now, anyone of my marketing coaching or Infusionsoft clients who asked me about open rates of their Infusionsoft emails (or emails in general), I have said something along the lines of: "Open rates are very unreliable....if it says that the email was opened, then it was, but if it says it was unopened, you have no idea if it was opened or not."

On top of that, many email clients (Outlook and Apple Mail for example) are configured to have a preview list on one side of the window and the email itself on the other. If you use your arrow keys to move up and down the preview list, then as you pass emails, they become "read"....you know that you haven't read them....you are passing them so you can get to the latest comment on your cat video Facebook post. But all the ones you scrolled through will be reported back as read.

As if that were not enough, most of the email providers are blocking all of the stuff that email marketing programs are using to track whether the email was opened or not. My buddy Jordan Hatch (one of Infusionsoft's redident geniuses) has written a great post in his blog that mentions the above, but really goes after the crappiness of email open rates from a different and interesting perspective...a good read.

Check it out at - http://www.jordanhatch.com/why-open-rates-are-a-crappy-metric/