How we boosted our marketing email open rate | Hacker News Reader

How we boosted our marketing email open rate

catonmat.net

96 pointsCuriositry76 comments

Email marketer here.

Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their increase in open rate.

Another thing to note is that most of the big email platforms now offer some kind of automated send-time optimization, which looks at an individual's open behavior over time and adjusts the send time individually for a given campaign to a time that person tends to be most responsive. In Salesforce this is called Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO).

STO really only boosts open rates by 5-10% at most on average (i.e., from 20% to 21-22%), which is another reason why I am skeptical of this "trick."

This.

Additionally, many enterprise email security providers doing automated phishing checks that click every link in the email and screen scrape the landing page to verify it's not an attack vector. If your market is the govt, schools, or large enterprises, this is absolutely juicing your CTRs.

Vanity email metrics are incredibly broken right now - the only numbers that mean anything are frictioned conversions like sign-ups, payments, session duration etc.

Hard to mitigate MPP, and enterprise opens were unreliable to begin with due to preview panes and image blocking.

But auto-clicks seem pretty easy to filter out of reporting data because they happen essentially instantaneously. Just drop clicks that happen within like 10 seconds of delivery.

Completely agree. People care too much about vanity metrics because they don't know how to measure what really matters.

I’m new to email marketing. I’m tracking the CTR locations and they are from unique individual cities and the OS type varies. Does this mean they are more likely actual clicks to the landing page? I’m guessing the email security would come from a similar location vs individual cities and say Linux for OS type?

Not necessarily - I don't know the details of these security providers, but they could use a proxy scraping service like BrightData, which proxies requests through real users mobile and residential IPs, thus making it look like real users are clicking.

I don't know this exact thing to be happening, but it could, so I don't think using IP location as the signal of "Human vs Not" is accurate.

Using time clustering of clicks vs send is a good one, also I've noticed that these security providers will click _every_ link in the email, all within a few minutes, so filtering out multiple clicks by one IP in a short time frame would work.

Ahh I see. Sweet thank you!

> I am skeptical of this "trick."

This one trick email providers don't want you to know!

Another way you can probably increase the effectiveness of marketing emails is to send less of them. If you're sending daily emails or worse multiple emails a day, your emails are spam and people will start auto-deleting them. This trains the spam filter to identify them as spam which means you will probably be identified as spam for other users with the same email provider.

If you're a clothing store, you can also increase the effectiveness of your marketing emails by only sending emails that are relevant to that customer. If I've never bought children's clothes at your store, that probably means I don't have any kids and am not interested in hearing about a sale on clothes for kids. Likewise, if I only buy men's clothes that means I'm probably not interested in hearing about sales on women's clothes.

In the case of Amazon, they have a bad habit of sending marketing emails if you've ever bought anything in a specific category. Buy a vinyl album for somebody as a Christmas gift once? That means you must be interested in hearing about similar vinyl albums on a regular basis.

The common thread between those 2 is that retailers collecting data on past customer purchases is a good practice for both the retailer and the customer but only if the data is used intelligently to send relevant marketing emails when they're going to be genuinely of interest to the customer.

> ... collecting data on past customer purchases is ...

illegal, unless you have obtained informed consent to collect and use that information for that purpose.

Your credit card is selling purchase data. So are most of the national retailers you visit.

That'll be one of the boxes he/she ticked or unticked that expressly gives that consent.

Admittedly, he/she probably didn't read it that way.

Unless you are looking over my shoulder, you won't know if I opened your email. And regardless of whether you are looking over my shoulder or you are instrumenting messages with intrusive surveillance, you're being creepy. Cut it out.

I can't believe people are still sending email marketing. I report spam and unsubscribe on literally anything marketing related even from services I use and all my friends do this as well and have for nearly a decade.

When done right, it works.

It's the hubspot/marketo approach of slamming inboxes with daily/weekly, non-specific garbage that needs to go. And buying lists or using lists from conferences - fuck that, it's just spam.

Following up with someone who explicitly gave you permission to send them emails after signing up for your service is reasonable and expected IMO.

It's the only channel that isn't owned by a walled-garden, so investing in it and treating it with respect is essential since it's the only way to communicate to customers and potential-customers without a middle-man extracting rent.

Except that people don't actually want that, if they did, they would read it. They just got confused by the signup form and accidentally left the checkbox checked

Speaking as someone who often recovers a friend's laptop from near oblivion, you'll be surprised how much some people will click any link that is presented to them.

so you mean that marketing mailing is either a nuisance (for tech-savy people) or an abuse (of the others) ?

Indeed

email has the single best ROI of any marketing channel. Even if you don't like it you should be self-aware enough to realize you might not be representative of the general population and act accordingly, especially if you are an entrepreneur

ROI is a dumb metric for a medium which is effectively free. Just another example of ignoring externalities.

ROI sure, until your domain gets blocked as a spam domain and you hire me to try to fix it

Wow man, good for you!

I have that pathology. Email marketing is the only challenging part of running a mail server.

And the gall of them... to call it unsubscribe! As if I ever "subscribed" and now I need to "undo" that action. Nope. I have never in my life signed up for an E-mail list or newsletter, let alone a marketing E-mail list. There is nothing to undo, because I never did anything in the first place. Calling the link "unsubscribe" is an insidious way to blame the spam recipient for the spamming. Your E-mail list is not full of subscribers, it's full of victims.

I'm curious. Isn't low open rate pointing to the fact that people don't want to read what you send them? How is this marketing email different from spam?

Well, you see, I think it's valuable informational content, and therefore anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.

Off topic rant, but in my personal experience brands destroy more value/goodwill on their email marketing campaigns than any incremental sales they generate.

Why even give me the option to not sign up for your email marketing list when I check out if you’re going to spam me anyway?

This is extremely on topic. If a company thinks "marketing email open rate" is a target, it has lost track of what marketing is.

The point is to drive business to the company and that is what should be measured. If people click on your email but don't do any purchase they were already about to make, they are useless. If your spam also alienate your customers, stop what you're doing, no matter your open rate!

I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing department get away with this.

'I don't understand how so many companies let their marketing department get away with this.'

Probably because their marketing people are highly skilled at marketing themselves.

It surely couldn't have anything to do with non-marketers overestimating their knowledge of marketing.

You wouldn't trust a marketer to give input on the job of computer programming. Why would you trust a programmer to give input on the job of marketing?

or... because marketing works.

Something folks here are rare to ever admit. HN is populated with amazing people who see thru all facades and are completely incapable of ever being a 'victim' of advertising, because we all know better!

Indeed it does, I'm not sure that means we shouldn't criticize some of the most annoying aspects of it though?

Marketing working is exactly what makes it unethical.

It definitely has an impact in general, that doesn't mean that every marketing campaign has a positive impact on their company. Though of course if you only ask the marketing department whether they are efficient, they are going to always say yes.

100%! I open every marketing email I receive, to hit unsubscribe...

The first time you personally get an effective marketing email it all starts to click - I suspect that you and I have had similar experiences in that we arent really the demographic those emails are trying to reach and that we only bought a product as the most expedient way to fill a need. Thus all further communication becomes an irritant.

But for me the aha moment was getting an email from a restaurant supply store where I was genuinely interested in the range of goods they were advertising (hell yes I would like more information on a cotton candy machine!).

The point here being that your own personal interaction with it might not generalize well - it alienates you, but maybe you arent really their customer anyway? Their might well be people that appreciate those emails.

I am not saying that no marketing campaign works, I am saying that not all of it is effective, and that companies should be at least interested in finding out whether their own marketing department is helping the business.

I don't understand how anyone takes "email click rate is high" as a definite signal that the whole effort is beneficial and worth the money.

This is similar to hiring a cloud team and getting reports that "CPU utilization is high" across the VMs. Of course using the cloud makes sense for a variety of companies, but if this is the only metric you use to know whether your cloud team is beneficial to the business, you really have no idea.

Ah, I see. I thought you had trouble seeing why some one would do that at all, which is how I previously felt.

It really seems like a traditional case of "bit shit at your job huh?". Like, they are trying to do the efficacious thing, just failing.

Marketing objectively makes the world worse. Every other complaint about them is just a matter of precisely how.

Their goal is to hijack our attention to sell us shit we don't need. To that end they will neg us and play confidence tricks. The constant exposure to these messages causes significant psychological damage that translates into sociological damage.

Society would be much better off if we shot every marketer into the sun.

Bill Hicks nailed it… https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

What I find still completely baffling about marketers is that not only they have no shame, but they still seems proud of it to the point on posting on HN.

Let’s be clear:

- You are, on purpose, annoying millions of people. - You are destroying the brand and the value that employ you - You are ensuring that the company is focused on metrics completely unrelated to its real success - You are consuming lot of resources of the company - You are consuming natural resources to do all of that. and, worse of all, - You have convinced everyone, from politicians to NGO and small family shop that everybody in the world should be like you and think like you.

That’s probably the first time ever I do really want to downvote a link submitted to HN

Yeah.

Marketers have turned my email, a tool I once used for personal connection, writing and corresponding with people in long form, into a soulless cesspool of corporate speak trying to sell me on something or drive my attention towards something with only one goal: give me your money. We want your money. We love money and we want yours, we want more, give me give me give me.

It is truly putrid, a plague on society akin to having a sociological STD - minus the sex, so it might even be worse. And its non-consensual so continue that analogy as you will.

We need radical policy reforms in privacy and universal “DO NOT MARKET TO ME” option, where, if violated, results in JAIL TIME for whoever clicked “send” on a marketing email, and the same for anyone who order them to click send. Not fines. Jail time. What they are doing is worse, far worse, than some carrying an ounce of weed in their ride.

That's a measurably false statement. Email marketing is done so aggressively because it's so successful. Marketing is about conversion. It's not about making everyone love you. Having a 1M customers who like your brand and don't buy anything is less valuable than 10K who spend actual money. You may be equally shocked that direct mail (ie paper mail) still have extremely high conversion rates which is you still get so many ads in your mailbox.

"I am a highly desireable mail I had over a dozen women agree to go on a date with me."

"How many women did you ask?"

"Twelve hundred, obviously I just need to be more aggressive in pursuing a larger number of women as it will make me more desirable."

I think this is probably not true. For certain types of businesses email marketing is shockingly effective at generating revenue. And extremely cost effective compared to paid advertising.

Of course some people are of the opinion that all marketing is inexcusable and that if the product is good it will sell itself. Respectfully, I’d question how much experience those people have with selling products.

Glad so much thought and energy is going into the industry that ruined email.

Finally a blog that doesn’t write a 3 paragraph filler to get to the point.

Love it, short and straight to the point.

Will suggest this to my manager, he loves seeing percentages very much. So much in fact that our OKR for next quarter is to boost our email open rate by 50%. That means from 1% to 1.5%.

If your open rate is that low, you probably should do a very thorough list cleansing. You're probably sending to many, many people who haven't opened your emails in years. You should stop sending to them, which will improve your metrics, in terms of spam filtering.

I would also look at the open rates for new subscribers during their first month on the list -- these should be quite high. If not, then you have much deeper problems to address than the timing of when you send the emails.

But don't do the list cleaning all at once. Instead, do it a little bit every quarter, so you can constantly claim credit for improving email open rates by a moderate amount.

1.5% is seriously low. We're up over 15% and sometimes over 30%. I think this is a not even great for SaaS. I suggest a serious audit by a consultant.

I read the title and felt the aura of SEO shit, but this is the best writing style I've ever seen.

Yes, getting straight to the point; it will never catch on.

Genius! I have scheduled emails to be sent exactly 1 day, 2 day... later so that it goes at similar times, never did I think to separate out the time part and generalise it for the user. Blindspot removed, thanks.

Spamming and surveillance. What's not to like?

I feel that the most successful con the spamming industry managed to do was to rename themselves "marketing email" or "mailing".

Could we just go back to "spam" which it is and has always be.

At least the plain text nigerian prince emails don't have a tracking pixel

I was completely astonished that this submission as nearly as much vote in a few hours than another, a lot more interesting, about trying to go to disney world without being spied.

It took me a while to remember that, despite its very light and cool interface, HN has been built by a subculture whose focus is to enrich itself by making companies that lure users then spy on them and try to extract as much profit as it could from them.

So you and I are probably the outsiders here…

I manage an ecom with nearly 50k subscribers. Open rate is dead since the recent IOS update completely skews the numbers, so most of us have switched to click rate.

Nonetheless, the strategy discussed in the link sounds pretty interesting. The thought process being people generally check emails around the same time? Might test it out.

> This trick was to start sending the emails at the same hour the user last visited our website.

> For example, if a user was last on our website at 3:43pm, then now we send the marketing emails to this user at around 3pm.

There’s 0 chance that this has any real effect on the click rate.

If you don’t want to keep track of when your users are visiting your site, you can instead use their time of signup as an approximation when they are likely to be online.

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