At Napier, we strongly believe that campaigns should be build upon facts and not guesswork, so we conduct a lot of research. Marketers love the precise numbers that are produced from online marketing campaigns, but are these figures misleading? Recently we completed a project with the University of Chichester that analyses the accuracy of email open rates, and the findings shocked us: open rates are badly wrong!
We knew that some people read emails without downloading images (it’s the image download that triggers an “open” to be registered). But we were shocked when the research suggested that almost as many electronics engineers will read your marketing emails without images as those that download the pictures: this means that your true open rate could be as much as double the figure produced by your email marketing software!
The findings also have huge implications for the design of campaigns: if your email needs images to be downloaded to look good, you are communicating ineffectively with up to half the recipients that actually read the email.
