Why tracking open rates is almost entirely a waste of time

I say “almost” because there are some reasons to do it at times. Although they get fewer and far between each day it seems. Some email providers are even openly bragging about how much harder they are making it to track emails (Protonmail comes to mind with that). And if you think that’s not going to get even more the case, then what a naive little bunny rabbit you surely are. But it ain’t just me saying this about tracking open rates. Back in 2015 I paid $5k to attend a conference about email marketing that had quite a few heavy hitters in the room. I am talking about marketers with email lists of 1-2 million opt-ins and higher, I believe, in some cases. And while the room was 10% Email Players subscribers (which did me proud…), the vast majority of what I heard and what was taught was a lot of churn & burn type stuff. Nothing about how to actually write more engaging emails. In fact, my way of doing things was mostly frowned upon, with a lot of the typical engagement tricks, tactics, hacks, taught instead. But one thing pretty much everyone in that room agreed upon? Tracking opens is all but worthless. The exception being just to monitor the overall health of your list. i.e., if your 30% open rates suddenly drop to 3% probably something is rotten in Denmark. More: Another person who agrees with this is my biz partner in BerserkerMail Troy Broussard. I don’t know any single person up in this industry who has a deeper understanding of the science behind email deliverability than he does. I am not saying there isn’t anyone who knows more. But, I personally have not met anyone who does — even though Troy is the last to call himself any kind of email deliverability expert, because he understands the variables that make up whether or not you are going to wind up in the primary tab, promotions tab, or junk/spam with every email you send. Do what you want with the following info. But, to give a lil’ demonstration of what I am talking about, below are some bits he teaches in our new “Email Down ’n Delivery” course about opens, tracking opens, obsessing over opens, & bragging about opens. Here goes: * “…the reason [open rates are an almost useless metric nowadays] is because there's been so many different privacy actions taken by all these different ESPs and all these different email clients, software that is all designed to protect privacy and prevent you from knowing what's going on with open rates.” * “They purposely hide and alter the data. Some of them trigger opens on everything just so you get inflated hundred percent open rates on everything, and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.” * “Others do just the opposite, and they strip all of the tracking pixels out of everything so that you have no idea whether it was opened or not.” * “This is very common on Android devices, for example, which many by default don't trigger opens, and this is true on many of the email platforms today where they will not trigger opens and other ones will simply automatically open everything.” * “And for example. . .Outlook is famous for this, where when the email comes into the Outlook preview pane, that automatically triggers an open. And so many times the person has not even really seen the email, but it just got auto triggered through Outlook in a way as they were rapidly scrolling through something and it just triggered an open when they really didn't even see anything in the content.” * “[Opens] used to be really valid many, many years ago, but today they're just statistically irrelevant and getting more and more irrelevant by the day with more privacy laws, with more restrictions.” * “With more platforms going out of their way to protect users' privacy with more throwaway and disposable domains and forwarding and rules to put stuff in people's folders that don't even go to their inbox, even though your delivery is taken to the inbox. It's no different than a vanity metric like likes on your Facebook page or something like that. It's just a vanity metric that really has no bearing whatsoever.” * “I will also tell you that the more you email, the more frequent you email, the lower your open rates are going to be. It is just a mathematical byproduct of being prolific as an email writer. If you're sending out multiple emails per week and emailing at least once a day, and sometimes three or four or five times in a day on promotional days and things like that where you might send on average 10 to 12 emails in a week, then I can guarantee you your open rates are going to plummet.” * “But you know what? What's also going to happen? You're going to make a hell of a lot more sales. And isn't that what really matters? Isn't that what this is all about? People that use these stupid little automation tricks around, "You haven't opened an email in 60 days, so we're going to unsubscribe you from our list," and all this horse shit. And this is kind of the ignorance of many marketers because they follow this marketing advice by people that are just not good email writers. They're not good email marketers in the first place. * “They may be some guru that is famous as a marketer, but it doesn't mean that they're a great email writer. It doesn't mean that they have a great relationship with their list. And let me tell you, as somebody that's run large scale campaigns, multimillion dollar launches for numerous seven, eight, and nine figure clients, and I've run a lot of them. Many of them have lists in the hundreds of thousands of people on their list, and yet they don't do very good when it comes to percentages and clicks and sales.” * “They may be good at their marketing, they may be good at selling $2,000 courses. They may be good at having influence and creating a lot of JV partners to promote their $2,000 promos and whatever, but that doesn't mean they're actually very good at writing email. And quite honestly, 98% of them don't write their own emails. Think about that for a minute.” Those are just some of the highlights. But you get the idea. It is why we are convinced the people prancing around the stages of events telling you to do all the stupid tricks Troy is referring to get away with it is because most of the emails responsible for their sales are not to their own lists… but from their affiliates' email lists. It costs them nothing to hand their affiliates email swipes. And it costs them nothing for those affiliates to send the exact same canned emails, saying the exact same thing, all very likely being penalized across the fruited planes as duplicate content by Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, whatever… while said goo-roos get the sales, the buyers names, and the back end benefits. Again, you do what you want with that info. Maybe “your” guru is different. But this shtick is probably as old as the idea of “push send” — where a whole bunch of affiliates push a bunch of emails out to their lists at the same time, thinking they will win a laptop or get a scooby snack from their favorite goo-roo… only to butcher their inbox deliverability in the process. But, someone might say, “their oPEn rATeZZZ! are high!” Are they, Pumpkin? I don’t know about that. Especially in light of what Troy has discovered above after split testing emails into the tens of millions for months on end when consulting as one of the world’s top email automation specialists. There is so much bull shyt out there you need a space shuttle to stay above it. But you’d probably never know if you only haunt Facebook groups for info. If you want mine and Troy’s take on how to get superior inbox deliverability you won’t see it on social media. You won’t see us write about it all that much, either, because it’s such an in-depth subject. So, instead, we’ve done two things to help out the industry: 1. Built our own email broadcasting/auto-responder platform with our own money, earned from getting our own emails delivered to inboxes selling our own offers (we did not take any investor funding — just our own piggy banks — with no exit strategy or needing investor/loans)… and that get engagement and sales.. 2. We created our Email Down ’n Delivery course. It’s about five hours long, plus some bonus content. So you can listen to it in probably one sitting if you put it on 2x speed. And even though we could probably very easily sell this baby for $100s if we wanted… during the launch (until tomorrow’s Friday 9/8 midnight EDT deadline) you can have it for a mere $20. No, it’s not charity. It’s practicality. The course is 95% “generic” info that can work with any reputable email platform. But, since so much of what’s inside is already “baked” into BerserkerMail, we figure the more businesses who buy, use, benefit from it, probably the more of those folks will want to use BerserkerMail. Unless, of course, they like doing things the hard way. And if that’s the case, all the power to them. Either way, the deadline is tomorrow. And the link to learn more about it is here: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/deliver]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2023 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA