EP. 25- OPEN RATES are DEAD! WRONG!!! l Jay’s Scoop

Foreign welcome to do this, not that the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson.

Let's do this, not that we are here for do this, not that fired up for this episode because I'm we are going to talk about email tracking that everybody says is useless and I'm going to give you a hack to that is so easy to do that it's a game changer. So what are we going to dig into here? Why am I already so fired up? It's too early to be this doesn't matter. Here I am.

Anytime I talk about email marketing, someone will say to me, oh yeah, we track our email. But we don't, we don't care about open rates anymore. Open rates are dead. Open rates are meaningless. And you see this comment everywhere.

First of all, what is an open rate?

If you send out an email to a hundred thousand people in any email tracking, any system that you send out in any platform that you use, you're going to get a tracking report. How did it do? And you're going to open up this track report after you hit send on that hundred thousand emails that you sent.

And it's going to say 100,000 emails were sent, 99,842 were delivered. It will show you your click through rate. How many people clicked, got like a 3% click through rate, whatever.

But it's going to show your open rate and I'll say like 27% open rate. So 27,000 people opened it. That's what it's going to say. And that is your open rate. But why are we even talking about open rate? Why do we care?

Because obviously we want to know how many people are opening up your emails. It matters. But there's so much that's gone on in the last four or five years from a technology perspective that open rates are now inflated.

They're inflated for a bunch of different reasons. There's bots out There, the Apple iOS on our phones and our iPads and all inflates open. So everyone now says, don't look at your open rate.

It's a meaningless stat. And that is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. And here's why. Open rates are a directional metric. They're not an absolute metric.

What do I mean by that?

If you send out an email and you send out a hundred thousand emails, and in your tracking report it says that you got a 30% open rate, it does not actually mean 30%. 30,000 people out of a hundred thousand opened it up. It doesn't because of all this stuff that's going on, all these bots and all this activity.

Right. But why is it so valuable? Why is everybody wrong when they say open rates are dead? Why am I so passionate about this? I'm going to tell you why.

If you send out an A B test, so you have 100,000 people, 50,000 people get an email that has a regular subject line.

The other 50,000 people get the same email, but the subject line, this time it starts, let's say, with an emoji in the subject line, you're testing it, emoji versus not an emoji, an AB test. Two groups of 50,000.

When you send it out and then you go back into your tracking report, you look at the tracking on the one that had no emoji and you add a 25% open rate. Then you look at the tracking for where you have an emoji in the subject line and you have a 32% open rate. So what does that mean?

It means by having that emoji in the subject line, you got an increase in the number of people that opened up your email.

It is a directional metric because it is telling you the results of this test that you did that, hey, when you use that emoji, it's going to give me a lift. It's like doing a Gallup poll, like a survey on all of the different testing that you're going to do. So the open rate is incredibly valuable.

No, it's not an absolute metric that 32,412 people opened up your email, but it isn't. It's a directional one saying, you tested this versus this. This got a higher open rate, so that's the one that's winning.

And so to not focus on open rates and use that information is ridiculous. And when someone says it to you, say, you are so wrong, it doesn't make any sense.

I get very upset about it because people say, well, you should only focus on the click now because the open rate's not real. It's like, what's wrong with you? Wake up. Come on now. Let's talk about the click for a second.

I want to give you a simple hack that you could test something. Let me ask you a question. When have you ever had this happen? Where you'll, you'll send out an email campaign, you'll get a lot of opens. Oh my God.

I got a, I got a 38% open rate. It's great. And I got a really high, I got a 4 1/2% click through rate. I don't care if it's business or consumer.

And then you look at how many people respond to how many people bought, how many people downloaded, how many people registered, whatever it is that you're asking them to do. And you get very few.

And you're always like, how is it possible that I had a zillion people open it, I had a zillion people click on it, but I got nothing. How is it possible?

And here's the problem, here's the problem is that you may be dealing with a lot of false positives, a lot of clicks, for example, that are not actually real clicks. So what happens is, I'm going to tell you how to test for this.

We are in this world where there's a lot of spyware, malware, adware, antivirus stuff going on because we're trying to make sure that no one's getting hacked or whatever. So when you send an email to somebody, a lot of times now receiving email networks are using what's called network intrusion software.

So before the email that you send gets delivered to the person that you're sending it to, systematically from a technical level, this network software is scanning the email and it's literally opening up every email and it's clicking on every link in the email that you're sending to see if any of those links are bad. They're going to have a virus in them. And when they're deemed to be safe, they're taking that email and they're delivering it to the person's inbox.

And it looks like it was never opened or clicked on.

But in your tracking report, it will show up as an open, it will show up as a click, which is rough because that inflates everything and that really can, can send you down a rabbit hole. Like why? What's going on, what's real and what's not real? And that's happening more and more, this inflation of opens and clicks and all this stuff.

Here's a simple thing that you can do to check for a bot activity, especially at the click level.

And this is not perfect, it's not going to capture everything, but it's going to give you an idea of how significant of a bot issue you have from a click through perspective. Here's what you do, you take business, consumer don't care.

You take your database, you send an email out to your database at 3am yes, at 3am and then what you want to do is isolate out the traffic, the click through traffic that you see in the first 30 minutes of that send from 3am to 3.30am why do you want to do that?

Because here's a secret, you're not that popular at 3am Anybody that's clicking in that first 30 minutes, I would say about 99% of the people that are clicking the first 30 minutes at 3am, they ain't real people, they're bots. And here's what you're gonna see in that report. You're gonna see a lot of people from different, let's say companies.

Let's say you're emailing 50 people at the Ford Motor Company that are in your database of a hundred thousand, right? You have 50 people at Ford Motor.

You're gonna see the lion's share of people at Ford Motor Company show up as a click through at 3am because they're using that network intrusion software for all of their users. And then you're going to be able to say, oh my goodness, we got this number of clicks in those first 30 minutes.

We should discount our tracking, our metrics in our reporting by this percentage because we know that that's likely what it's at least being inflated by. So this one time send that you're going to do at 3am and you isolate out that traffic.

It is a super, super easy way to get an idea of how rough things are.

One other thing to really also think about is when you're thinking about your tracking, whether it's your opens, your clicks or whatever it is, people always ask this one ridiculous question. They go, what is the industry average for the manufacturing sector? What is the industry average for the healthcare sector?

What's the open rate industry average? What is the click through rate industry average for this industry or that industry? I get that question all the time. It's a nonsense question.

Who cares? Who cares what the industry averages for any industry? Doesn't mean anything. What matters is you. What matters is what's your average?

Is that your company? Because there's too many variables. All right, so what you want to do is you want to benchmark all of your different kinds of email sends.

What is your open rate and click through rate when you send out your email newsletter? What is your open rate and click through rate when you send out your offer related emails? What is your open rate and click through rate.

When you send out your transactional emails, you bucket the different types of emails that you send out and then you, you maintain the tracking on those. So Yeah, I got 30% open rate on my newsletter and 2% click through rate next time I send it out. I tested something, I got it up to 35% and 3%.

I'm doing better, I'm winning directionally. We're heading in the right direction.

But you need to segregate out the different types that you're doing to because your offer emails and your newsletter are apples and garbage cans. They're not in the same universe. All right, so the things to think about is open rates are super important. Click bots.

You want to try to figure out what how big of a problem that is and you want to benchmark yourself. And forget about this idea of industry averages. What a waste of time.

Now before we get into the last segment of this thing, right we have our since you didn't ask, which is always chaos. I'm super excited to share that this podcast do this not that is now exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is awesome. I am a big fan.

Why am I a big fan of Marigold and why am I so excited to partner with them on this podcast? Because I am a long term customer. So what is Marigold?

Marigold is one of the primary email sending platforms that my company uses and it is the relationship marketing platform and it's designed to help you acquire new customers and literally turn them into lifelong super fans with their best in class loyalty solutions. And they have incredible clients. American Airlines, Honey bake Ham, Title Boxing, Notre Dame University, every industry.

And I will tell you, I have been a customer of theirs for years. I'm sending my emails out on their platforms for years. So I strongly recommend check out Marigold. Meet Marigold.com. awesome.

Now let's jump into the last segment of this thing called since you didn't ask, this is where I talk about nothing to do with work or, or anything that's relevant. What is on my mind.

I'm going to tell you what is on my mind because this just happened and my wife is probably not going to talk to me if she listens to this, which is fantastic. So this is the best. I can't remember anybody's name. When we go somewhere, somebody be like, I'm like, hi, nice to meet you.

And they'll say their name. Hi, I'm Brian. And within 30 seconds, I mean it doesn't even go in one ear, out the other. It Never goes in the ear. I cannot.

I cannot absorb people's names. I. I don't. Maybe I'm a horrible person. Maybe I'm shallow. I don't know. There's gotta be a trick that I'm not doing because I fail.

I can't remember anyone's name ever. I barely know my own name. It's unbelievable.

So the best was me and my wife were going out somewhere and my wife can't stand it because she's like, how can you not remember that person's name? We met them seven times. I'm like, I don't know, what is their name?

So we were going out somewhere to this event and there were going to these people there and my wife's like, hey, you need to try to remember some of these people's names because you met them before and it's going to be weird and blah, blah. So she's running down the list. She goes, this person's name is Steve and this is Jennifer and this is Heather and this is Bobby.

And I'm trying to remember. I'm like, literally studying. Like, this is the SATs. I am memorized. I'm on it. I'm like, I'm not going to screw this up. It's fantastic.

I got this and I was ready and. And there was this one woman, this woman, Heather, right? As soon as we walk in, I see Heather, right?

And she's walking towards us and I'm like, got this, whatever. And then my wife, though, walks like one step in front of me and she walks right up to Heather and she goes, hey, Jennifer, good to see you.

And I lost it because she got it wrong right to the person's face and it was unbelievable. And I looked at her, I'm like, oh, this is so great. And then she looked at me like, don't even, don't even do that.

But everything about it was fantastic and I was so excited. And yes, and I hope she doesn't hear this because then she'll be like, what is wrong with you? And she'll be right. Oh my God, why do I share?

I don't know. Anyway, thanks for listening to this thing. And seriously, if you don't hate this podcast, give this thing a five star review or give it a one.

I don't know, just do something. Let's go. Let's have fun. Thanks for checking it out and we'll see you soon. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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