How Many Subscribers Actually READ Your Email?
© 2003, Steve Shaw
Would you like to find out exactly how many of your
subscribers are opening and reading the emails you send to
them? This article describes a very quick and simple method
that anyone can use to do this, that you'll be able to
implement immediately on all the HTML mail that you send out.
Let's look at a simple example of how this vital statistic
can benefit you.
Say if you had a list of ten thousand - you send out an
email, describing a great opportunity, and let's say, to
keep this simple, that you get a 1% click-through ratio.
That means only 100 of those ten thousand subs are actually
going through to the site - and then perhaps only 1-5% of
those actually make a purchase.
That means from a mailing to ten thousand, you could end
up with a single sale. Fairly miserable result I know, but
we're being pretty conservative here.
But imagine if you could track exactly how many of those
ten thousand were opening and reading your email.
You might find out that only 30% of your subscribers
(three thousand subs) actually opened the email - which if
you measure your CTR against those who actually read it,
rather than the number of subscribers you send it to, gives
you an improved 3.3% CTR.
Once you're armed with this statistic, you can work in
future on improving the number of subscribers who actually
read your email. For example, a more intriguing subject
line that grabs your subs by the throat and screams 'open
me' could double the Open Ratio (OR) for your email, which
in turn will double your response rate; and improving the
body of your email so that it bypasses as many spam filters
as possible, will help it reach many more of your valuable
subs.
Do you see how powerful this statistic can be?
So let's look at how you can easily calculate this statistic for
yourself, with every HTML email you send out. It's a simple
two-step approach:
- Firstly set up a tracking URL by doing one of the
following:
A. Either set up a special page on your web site - it
doesn't have to have any particular content, it's only
purpose is to find out how many 'visitors' the page has
received. It's a good idea to set up a special directory on
your server, such as 'ezine', and then give the page a
unique name related to your email - you could use the date
when you send the mailing, such as '10312003.html'.
(If you do a split mailing, for example to test
which subject line generates the best open rate, you could
set up two pages such as '10312003A.html' and
''10312003B.html'. Get the idea?)
B. Or, if you use an ad tracking script, set up an ad
tracking URL. Again, if you do a split mailing, just set up
more than one.
- Then add an HTML image (img) tag somewhere in your html
email. Set the height and the width of the image to zero,
and set the source (src=...) to the URL of the page/ad
tracking URL you've set up on your site. (If you're not
sure how to construct the image tag, do a quick search on
Google for 'HTML img tutorial', and you will find plenty of
material to help you.)
Here's how this simple system works.
- Your email is opened by the subscriber.
- The image tag secretly loads the tracking URL that you
specified as the source of the image, generating a 'hit'.
To find out your Open Ratio, i.e. how many of your
subscribers actually open and read your email, just check how many
unique visitors your tracking URL received. Divide that by the number of subs on your list, and multiply by a hundred - and you have your Open Ratio as a nice percentage.
The most important part however is to put that statistic
to good use - work on improving your open rate, and you
will see your response rates improving too.
Need content for your web site or ezine? You can republish this article, but please just write to me first to let me know, and I'll send you a short bio to include.
