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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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!

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