Pat Flynn, a blogger I follow and admire, has published a tip for increasing your email open rates. He describes his technique in good detail and includes all of the right cautions, but ultimately it boils down to this.
Re-send the email to everyone who did not open it.
Basically he offers up a tip to use your Aweber tracking stats to segment out subscribers who did not open an email, and then resend that email to that segment with an some re-writing so that it isn’t a blatantly obvious duplicate.
Pat does give this warning though.
Of course, you do run the slight risk of a spam complaint.
To me that risk is unacceptably high, and the reason is that open rates are highly inaccurate. Segmenting subscribers based on the open stats in Aweber will, in my opinion, guarantee that you resend the email to a small number of people who actually did open the first one.
How Does Email Open Tracking Work?
If you are using Aweber or a similar email service provider you would be aware that you can send emails in either text-only format, HTML format, or both at the same time.
Open tracking only works for HTML messages, not text-only messages. Aweber says as much in their knowledge base.
Open rate tracking is only possible for messages that include an HTML version. If you are sending a plain text-only message, we cannot track how many times that message is opened.
One of Pat’s commentors hinted at this (can’t find direct link to comment sorry).
I think it’s important to mention that this can be a bit annoying for some of your readers who don’t download images in emails. If they don’t download them they will not be counted as openers.
So how does this comment relate to Aweber’s knowledge base article and the overall point that open tracking only works for HTML emails? Simple, Aweber embeds a 1×1 pixel tracking image in every HTML email that is sent out by their customers.
This means that any HTML email you send, even if you don’t add any images of your own, will include at least one image. If you view the source of an HTML email sent by Aweber you will see this bit of code towards the end.
img src="http://openrate.aweber.com/y/o/?l=unique_string_here" alt="" width="1" height="1"
Modern email clients and webmail services such as Gmail do not display remote images in emails until you specifically permit them. In Gmail you would see a message like this.
Unless the subscriber chooses to display images, or adds you as a trusted sender so that they are always displayed by default, then any emails from you that they open will not count in your open rate. Therefore, open rates are not a reliable, accurate statistic.
A Better Way to Segment Non-Responsive Subscribers
The point of Pat’s technique is that you have sent something important to your list and they have not taken the desired action. For most bloggers getting emails opened is not the end goal. The actual goal is to get them to click a link to some content, an affiliate offer, or a sales page.
Click tracking also works in both text-only and HTML formatted emails.
This makes click rates a better way to segment your subscribers for repeat or followup email messages. You can basically follow Pat’s advice but substitute “Link not clicked” instead of “Message not opened”.
Avoiding Sending Duplicate Emails
Even though my opinion is that segmenting by clicks instead of opens is better, that still doesn’t avoid the issue of resending the same (or too similar) email messages to your list. Even if you avoid spam complaints you do risk damaging your reputation with those subscribers.
If they didn’t click your link then either your headline, body, or call to action didn’t resonate with them in some way. So to avoid the issue of duplicate emails my strong recommendation is that you only send them an email that is newly written and therefore contains a new headline, body, and call to action. After all, if the first one failed to convert them then you need to try something new anyway.
So what do you think? If Pat’s technique made you feel uncomfortable would you feel better using my method instead? Or would you use neither of these techniques to try and improve your conversions?
Image Credit: Flickr
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great follow up to my post Paul, and thanks for not totally bashing the technique I mentioned, while still providing a alternative. As I mentioned in my post, I’ve used it on my other lists without any complaint, but only after waiting a good number of days, re-writing the subject line and content, and being honest about the re-send. If I have an important email, such as a deadline in the industry that my subscribers really should read, then I feel I almost have to make sure I give them the best chance to see that email, and sometimes that means a resend.
Often times, my emails don’t include links at all, just important information – so the link technique (which is very smart!) will not work in such cases.
Cheers Paul!
Yeah none of this stuff suits every situation perfectly. If it did we’d all be rich right ;-)
My open rate runs high so I probably won’t change anything overall. I’d follow Pat’s system if there was a deadline on a product/event I knew would be of interest to readers who hadn’t opened the first email, however.
Hi Paul,
I read with interest Pat’s suggestion when he posted it and I think you’ve come up with a good idea, too. I think one should test both methods and see what the results are. You won’t really know until you try. It would be nice to try using different subscribers though in order not to skew the results of being first or second method.
Have you adopted any method and what were your results?
Thanks,
Karen