So, a good friend of mine in the HR industry emailed me the other day with a question about open rates. Yes, that’s right, even my non-work, non-marketing friends think about these things.  So my friend hits me up with the following scenario:  She is responsible for a regular newsletter that her company sends out to all associates, partners, clients and other industry professionals.  However, even though the content is very relevant and timely and the list is composed of people in the HR field, she was only seeing open rates of around 12-13%. Always looking to improve her performance, she asked if I had any thoughts or tips to offer.  Now anybody who knows me will tell you that I can’t say no to a friend in need–especially when they are need of marketing advice.

So, I took a look at one of her emails and talked with her about their audience and engagement process and came up with the following points that are relevant for all email marketers, even those of us concentrating in music media marketing.

Full disclosure: My friend and the company she works for are not FanMail clients and are not associated with FanMail or ExactTarget.

The first thing I did was look at the email for design and content best practices.  In terms of design, it was flawless: coherent and non-distracting themes, organized content areas, even bookmarks for easy navigation. As for the content, well, there is not a lot that can be done to jazz up new court interpretations of hiring standards or how federal workers’ compensation regulations have changed. I mean this is a human resources newsletter, not a concert promoters‘ show calendar or a record label’s new artist announcement.  The main thing that I pointed out here was to break up the copy with an image now and then to keep things interesting to the eye.

The second thing I looked at was the list. Who is on it? What kind of communication would this qualify as? While some of the subscribers are clients, the primary purpose of the newsletter is to keep HR industry professionals informed and up-to-date. This means that this would qualify as a B2B (business-to-business) send instead of a B2C (business-to-customer) send.  Typically, one would expect to get above average open rates on a B2B send, definitely not the 12-13% that she was seeing. That’s when I noticed that a large number of the subscribers were employees of the company–wait, I’ve seen something like this before! I asked her how many of her coworkers read their emails on their blackberry. Most, if not all, she surmised, because the company provides them with blackberries. Many people only read the text version of email on their smart phones, or don’t load the images at least. This means that they don’t get counted as an open because open tracking requires images to be loaded from the email server.  When we compared click-through rates to open rates, this point was further proved. According to their click-tracking one would expect an open rate of around 40-50%, which indicates that many more emails are being opened then the numbers show.

The final point I raised was the ESP being used. As I have noted before, sending emails on an ESP with a less than stellar sender reputation is like throwing emails away, or at least into the junk-mail folder which is basically the same thing.  With communication and effective engagement being the cornerstone of successful fan relationship management and fan marketing, our clients (whether they are festival and events promoters or small independent artists) would be losing money if we did not provide them with the absolute best in deliverability, even if the cost of services was less because the drop in revenue due to poor deliverability would far outweigh the savings. So my suggestion here was to get a deliverability report from their ESP and to also set up a bunch of test accounts across several domains (gmail, hotmail/live, yahoo, etc.) and test if the emails are making it to the inbox or the junk folder.

As with all metrics, open rates are only a small snap-shot, they do not tell the whole story. However, they do give a good first impression of the effectiveness of a send.  The three things to consider when trying to improve this number are design/content of the email itself, the quality and composition of the subscriber list, and the deliverability of the email which is based upon sender IP reputation.  By keeping an eye on these factors, it is possible to see open rates that many of us dream about. So keep working and improving and tuning your processes and let’s get as many people opening your emails as possible.

I would fix Outlook so that it rendered emails with IE or some engine other than Word. I would do some other things too: have Chelsea and Man U replay that Champions League Final without Drogba getting sent-off and Terry falling, get Carnivale put back on the air, and make Fat Tire available in Cincinnati. The fixing Outlook thing would be very high on my priority list though.

Internet marketers and developers have been pulling there hair out over Outlook’s rendering of HTML emails ever since Outlook 2007 first came out.  In the past, Outlook used Internet Explorer to render emails. This was fine, it was great. Oh, it suppresses CSS and Flash objects? Fine, no big deal, so does GMail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. We can work that. Now though, Outlook uses Word, a word-processor, to render emails within the application. All of a sudden background images are no longer supported and only the most basic of HTML will render properly. Here is what the same email looks like in Outlook 2000 and in Outlook 2010. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem except that Outlook has the largest market-share of end-users by far and has wantonly gone and changed the standards that it uses to render emails.

But what can we do about such things?

Well, first of all, we have to cope. ExactTarget has published a white paper about designing for Outlook 2007 with some tips to ease the pain. The main point they make though is to “test, test, test”. Which is always sage advice.

Secondly, we can make our collective despair heard by raising our voices together. To this end, fixoutlook.org has risen to herald the cause. I encourage you to visit their site and lend your voice, especially since Microsoft has recently announced that Outlook 2010 will continue to use Word to improperly render emails.