Email marketing software and autoresponder software are essential tools for effective email marketing campaigns. Email marketers determine the effectiveness of an email message using traditional parameters such as open rate and click rate. Email open rate is the percentage of the number of people who opened the email. Click rate is the percentage of the number of people who click on the links to visit the website that is promoted in the email.

These figures can be percentages of the actual messages sent or actual messages delivered (as some messages may get bounced). For example, take this case. A marketer has sent 1000 emails. The email marketing software and autoresponder software tools have returned the following statistics: 10% bounced, 30% open rate, 10% click rate. That means out of the 1000 mails, only 900 were delivered to the inboxes as 10% of the mails bounced. Of those 900 mails, only 270 (30%) were opened, and among those 270 people who cared to read the mails, 27 people (10%) clicked on the links.

Pros And Cons Of Email Open Rates

Many marketers say that email open rate does not reflect the real number of customers who read the mail. After all, it only shows the ratio of who opened the mail. There are serious differences between opening and reading, as every net user knows. The technical issues of the email marketing software and autoresponder software complicate the issue further.

Suppose a user has right-clicked on the email message to delete it. Some tools record it as a click for opening the campaign and use it to calculate email open ratios. In some cases, the e-mail client or websites that offer e-mail service provide the option of "text only" emails to the users. As the tracking code embedded on the email is an html script, it gets disabled by the e-mail client on the user's system. So, it cannot report whether the user has opened the mail or not. That is why selecting a state-of-the-art and sophisticated email marketing software and autoresponder software is necessary for effective online marketing.

Yet, the supporters of open rates point out that something is better than nothing. If one cannot use open rates or click rates, there is absolutely no yardstick to measure the effectiveness of the marketing emails. Also, tracking and improving email open rates can be a great way to track the efficiency of various processes adopted by email marketing firms.

Ways To Improve Email Open Rates

The open rates can be used to find out the effectiveness of a particular style of email subject and the sender email address. When the user receives a mail, the subject line and the sender address are the only information he or she can get before opening the mail. Obviously, these two factors can play a big part in improving the success rate of email campaigns. An online marketing company can try out various subject lines and sender addresses and then find out the most effective kind of subject lines and sender addresses by comparing the open rates.

Open rates help in checking the ability of the email messages to slip through spam filter tools. Also, one can find out whether any particular e-mail servers are blocking the emails, from the open rates provided by marketing software and autoresponder software.