If you are one of the many groups sending out bulk-emails to your members and wonder why your open rates continue to decline, there are two likely reasons.

The first is list fatigue. After receiving the same information on a regular schedule again and again, users begin to lose their enthusiasm. The more messages you send, the more likely they will begin to ignore them.

The more likely reason for declining open rates is a technological shift by the ISPs to set their email clients to block images by default. Gmail, MS Outlook 2003, AOL 9, Verizon, Comcast, MSN, and Earthlink all block images by default.

Why does this matter? Shari Worthington of telesian.com explains, “Because that’s how e-mail marketers track open rates. Either a main header graphic in the e-mail or a small one-pixel graphic in the bottom corner has a special URL that’s tracked for the number of times it’s hit. That tells you how many times the e-mail has been opened.”

Shari also reported that 34 percent of .edu domains, our primary audience, have strict blocking techniques that throw off your open rate numbers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.