FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What type of mailings make up these results?
- Mailings sent to more than 10 recipients.
- Mailings sent in the 90 days prior to when the report was run.
- Mailings of current customers according to when the report was run.
- Only the recipients that received the HTML version of a mailing were counted in the number sent. Recipients of text-based messages were not counted because of the limitations in tracking text-based messages.
How are the delivery, open and click-through rates calculated?
All the rates are based on the number of messages sent.
What is the delivery rate?
The delivery rate is the number of messages sent minus the number of messages bounced divided by the number of messages sent. Both hard and soft bounces are included in this calculation.
Why are the open rates so much lower than the delivery rates?
Opens are tracking when a small image in the messages is displayed while the recipient views a message. It is more common these days for the email programs of message recipients to have images turned off by default. This makes it difficult to accurately tell whether a message is being opened or not. For this reason, the open rate should be viewed as a minimum and used not in absolute terms but rather in relative terms to other like statistics. (e.g., comparing the open rates of all industries for a given period of time.) In many cases, HTML and text versions of a message are sent concurrently in a format called Multipart/Alternative. In the system, these are marked as HTML messages since it is assumed that the recipient will view the HTML version. However, the recipient might have an email client that prefers the text version (e.g., BlackBerry, Cellphone, UNIX-based email clients) and hence the system would not be able to track if it were opened.
Does tracking click-throughs have similar limitations to tracking opens?
No. Click-through works differently and is a fairly accurate indicator to the number of recipient that clicked on a specific link.
Are there any other limitations?
The rates only count the intended recipient. For example, if a message goes to Sally and Sally decides to forward the message to ten of her friends then the messages is counted to having being sent to one person, and opened by one person. If Sally and all her friends click on a particular link in the message then only one click-through would be recorded. In our experience, since less than 5% of messages are forwarded, this could potentially increase the open and click-through rate by 5% (e.g., an increase of an open rate of 27.2% by 5% would make it roughly 28.5%.)
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DELIVERY STATS
Compare your email marketing results with this evolving benchmark data to evaluate your performance and identify emerging industry trends.
