Another reason to hate auto-think

I'm sure ESP's (email service providers) can suck for a lot of reasons.

Here's one...

One particular ESP sucks because they've taken to putting a red line across all stats for broadcast emails that don't have a pre-determined open rate.

 What's the required open rate to avoid the scarlet banner?

 Beats me, and it seems even they don't know.  

Here's the first paragraph of their article on What Is A Good Open Rate?:

"The truth is that there is no specific answer that can be given to this question, but the open rate offers very useful information nonetheless. Open and click rates vary widely from industry to industry, campaign to campaign, and case to case. Each campaign is like a fingerprint in that it is affected by a unique combination of factors."

Yet that doesn't stop them from putting this aggravating line of useless crap all over the dashboard of any account that doesn't have a "good" open rate. 

"Hey Authoritarian BS Rule-Making ESP, guess what?"

I give nary a dang about what your opinion of open rates is.

Why? 

Because open rate is notoriously hard to track, doesn't tell you anything about your audience or your campaign, and doesn't mean near as much as sales rates.

Oh, I know that if someone doesn't open your email they won't buy. I also know that if someone doesn't open your emails you can remove them, or they'll remove themselves from your list.

The fact is that people don't open different emails for different reasons, and you've got to sift through a lot of folks who sign up to get free crap with no intention of ever reading any of your emails.

No matter how you slice it, with Google and other email providers tossing out email you want to read because they think you shouldn't want to read it... or deciding when to send your email to Spam even if it's what you want to read... nobody needs to see someone else's opinion of an open rate on every email, every day, simply because they think it's a good idea to prod you to do something differently.

If you're a marketer, this is just some more of the BS you'll have to deal with.

As for me, I'm looking for another email provider that doesn't give me crap every day because they don't like whatever numbers they look at.

I don't know about you, but I'm capable of making decisions for myself. Which includes which emails I want to read, which emails I want to send to Spam, and which lists I want to be on.

Screw the wannabe mind controllers and all their auto-thinking-for-you machines.

Bottom line?

Keep opening my emails if you want to keep getting them.

Click here if you want a flood of unstoppable traffic.
  

Venture Boldly

Dave Kotecki
Count of Copy

P.S. Aside from that stupid red banner about open rates, I love my ESP. I just have a very strong aversion to unnecessary BS.