The highest open rate I've ever had was 82% to a list of 10,000 people, for my client Alice Liveing. Do I actually think 8,000 people opened that email? No. Here's why...

Mornin' Reader,

I got asked a good question last week.
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(I actually did, btw - this isn't one of those 'I'll pretend someone asked me a question just so I can talk about this' 😂)

Someone DM'd me and said:

"I heard Google changed the ability for people to analyze email open rates. Is that true?"

I'm gonna give a politician's answer here and answer this indirectly. Because it actually opens up a bigger debate:

ARE OPEN RATES ACCURATE IN THE F*CKING SLIGHTEST?

Short answer: kinda.

Longer answer:

So recently Google and Apple updated their privacy settings, meaning open rate reporting is even more dodgy than it was beforehand.

In some email accounts, we saw open rates go from 50% to 80% overnight.

In others, they went from 40% down to 15-20%.

(That was fun trying to explain why to my clients 🙃)

These have kinda levelled back out now - and this is the key. Open rate reporting isn't accurate. But it's accurately inaccurate, if that makes sense? 😂

You don't know for sure how many people opened your email. But you DO know if that email performed better or worse than the previous emails, because the data is consistently wrong.

So if you send 3 emails and the stats say:

Email 1 - 56% open rate

Email 2 - 65% open rate

Email 3 - 45% open rate

We don't actually know that number of people opened each email, but we do know Email 2 got the most opens.

So yes, it is still worth tracking your open rates - but don't be obsessed with them.

I actually never report average open rates to my clients. They don't care. They want to know the emails are making sales. Which is far more important.

Questions?

Reply.

Cheers!

Alex

The longest P.S. ever:

My good pal Kennedy shared an unreal tip on LinkedIn last week around boosting email open rates.

What you do is, send an email first to people who've opened one of your emails in the last 5 days. Then an hour later, send the same email to people who haven't opened an email in the last 5 days. Since your first email will get an amazing open rate, it tells the Email Gods it's a good email - boosting the deliverability of the second email to your colder engagers.

I tried this for my client Lauren Jumps (ooooo another name drop 😂 sorry I'm so bad for that) and these results are interesting:

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69% of people who opened an email in the last week opened the email vs 16% of people who haven't.

Just shows how important it is to keep your list lean: delete anyone who hasn't opened an email in the past 90 days (but make sure when you're filtering these people that you don't include anyone who signed up in the last 90 days - otherwise you'll delete new people on your list who've missed their first couple of emails - made that mistake before 😂)

Bye (again).

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