Death of the Open Rate / All Hail the Click!
Death of the Open Rate
Oh, the drama! Email marketing gurus are all atwitter over the demise of the beloved open rate, thanks to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection playing the grim reaper and Gmail's Proxy Servers acting as the undertaker. It's like a soap opera in the inbox world!
Why wouldn’t they, considering Apple make up 55.47%, Gmail 31.08% of the market share of Email Clients (Source — Litmus).
Oh, email open rates? So yesterday! Thanks to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, which came strutting in with iOS 15, the whole "did they or didn't they open my email" game has turned into a guessing match. This feature sneakily downloads all the emails and their flashy images ahead of time, so figuring out if someone actually laid eyes on your message is like trying to read tea leaves in the dark. So, as far as measuring email campaign success goes, open rates are basically the new flip phone—outdated and not that useful, according to the gurus over at Campaign Monitor.
And let's not even start on Gmail's little party trick with proxy servers. They've got this thing called the Gmail tracking pixel, which is basically a spy in disguise, downloading a teeny tiny image when an email is opened. It's all in the name of privacy, darling, keeping the where's and what's under wraps while still letting you know someone peeked at your email. But here's the catch: it's about as reliable as a chocolate teapot. This whole proxy shindig can make it look like your email's the hottest ticket in town, with open rates soaring higher than a Friday night karaoke note. And Gmail, bless its heart, sometimes gets a bit too eager, marking emails as opened by bots faster than you can say "spam," even before a real human gets a chance. This whole circus act makes open rates about as trustworthy as a two-dollar bill, spilling the tea courtesy of GMass.co
All Hail the Click!
Why is click-through rate strutting down the email marketing runway like it owns the place? Honey, because it's the first morsel of real tea spilled directly by your contacts. Plus, a click is like the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of juicy contact data, leading you to treasure troves of customer insights.
Now, imagine spicing up your email campaigns with a Novel Survey. It's not just any survey; it's the life of the party! Your contacts get to play along right from their inbox. They give a little tap or click on their answer and—voilà—they're whisked away to a webpage (picked by you) that greets them with a personalized response image. It's like magic, but better, because this trick also gathers all the gossip on your customers:
Their whereabouts — City slickers, state hoppers, country dwellers, timezone travelers.
Their tech swag — What device they're flashing, the operating system they're rocking, and the browser they're surfing.
And the cherry on top? You can snag your customers' survey responses and tuck them into your Mailchimp Audience for some next-level segmentation and personalization. It's like getting to know your guests before the party even starts!
