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onion2k

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients.

Great!

The open rate of the email was 45,8%

That's excellent.

...and 27 people replied.

Oh. Oh dear.

~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague.

96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is by far the more important number. If the people who'd tried the app were a random sample of the population then 2.2% might be enough to suggest there's a valid premium business model there, but the people who tried the service weren't randomly selected - they were a self-selected group of people who are interested enough in user testing to sign up for the service. If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (alledgedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a big messaging problem.

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> but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is by far the more important number.

I think the more helpful baseline is likely the folks that opened the email (we can't infer a lot from the ones that didn't -- email services may have simply junk-mailed the message for the other 54.2%). 27 / 560 is 4.8% which is still not awesome, but it's really not terrible.

1 in 20 people who saw OP question about the service were compelled enough to provide a response. That's not bad.

> If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (allegedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a big messaging problem.

I really wouldn't be so down on it. What's the average read-to-recommend on the average unsolicited call to action message? How many people actually provide extra details when an application on our computers crashes and the OS wants to send a bug report?

How many actually send the bug report? That's just a button click.

Providing their email for updates is a good indicator the base pitch is interesting, true. But it's an almost mindless activity. How many times a month does the average technophile give away an email address?

Enough times, is how many. And enough times to likely forget more often than not what they'd signed up for a day ago, let alone continue to really, really care about it.

I'm sure OP could have built a more compelling email campaign that used the right communication strategies to elicit a greater response. But, I'll take 5% over 0.

>27 / 560 is 4.8% which is still not awesome, but it's really not terrible.

That is called click-to-open ratio and you're right it is a good metric. However 4.8% is not a good number. Typical healthy marketing emails see CTOR around 20%

> The open rate of the email was 45,8%

How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

These numbers are usually overstating I find, likely a lot less people actually read the email.

I click on a lot of emails just to find the unsubscribe button, and sometimes open-archive is the fastest way to get things out of my inbox

From MailChimp's website

http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-rates

And: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-...

The emails were sent via Mailchimp, the open rate was gotten from Mailchimp's reports (analytics).

Yep indeed it's faulty: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-...

I wouldn't say its faulty. They clearly said unique open rate is even more accurate now. The only thing that suffered was seeing multiple opens from same user. Which I feel is far less interesting

So, this just counts broken email clients that load external images in email (which, I suppose are a lot -- but they're still broken, IMNHO).

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