Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we boosted our marketing email open rate

catonmat.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 81 posts

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#71

Post by burnished »

remram wrote: post #60
burnished wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time you personally get an effective marketing email it all starts to click - I suspect that you and I have had similar experiences in that we arent really the demographic those emails are trying to reach and that we only bought a product as the most expedient way to fill a need. Thus all further communication becomes an irritant. But for me the aha moment was getting an email from a restaurant supply store…

I am not saying that no marketing campaign works, I am saying that not all of it is effective, and that companies should be at least interested in finding out whether their own marketing department is helping the business. I don't understand how anyone takes "email click rate is high" as a definite signal that the whole effort is beneficial and worth the money. This is similar to hiring a cloud team and getting repor…

Ah, I see. I thought you had trouble seeing why some one would do that at all, which is how I previously felt.

It really seems like a traditional case of "bit shit at your job huh?". Like, they are trying to do the efficacious thing, just failing.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#72

Post by blep_ »

unpopular42 wrote: post #24

I'm curious. Isn't low open rate pointing to the fact that people don't want to read what you send them? How is this marketing email different from spam?

Well, you see, I think it's valuable informational content, and therefore anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#73

Post by sam0x17 »

ren_engineer wrote: post #35
sam0x17 wrote: post #10

I can't believe people are still sending email marketing. I report spam and unsubscribe on literally anything marketing related even from services I use and all my friends do this as well and have for nearly a decade.

email has the single best ROI of any marketing channel. Even if you don't like it you should be self-aware enough to realize you might not be representative of the general population and act accordingly, especially if you are an entrepreneur

ROI sure, until your domain gets blocked as a spam domain and you hire me to try to fix it

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#74

Post by survirtual »

ploum wrote: post #36
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing objectively makes the world worse. Every other complaint about them is just a matter of precisely how. Their goal is to hijack our attention to sell us shit we don't need. To that end they will neg us and play confidence tricks. The constant exposure to these messages causes significant psychological damage that translates into sociological damage. Society would be much better off if we shot every marketer…

Bill Hicks nailed it… https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 What I find still completely baffling about marketers is that not only they have no shame, but they still seems proud of it to the point on posting on HN. Let’s be clear: - You are, on purpose, annoying millions of people. - You are destroying the brand and the value that employ you - You are ensuring that the company is focused on metrics comple…

Yeah.

Marketers have turned my email, a tool I once used for personal connection, writing and corresponding with people in long form, into a soulless cesspool of corporate speak trying to sell me on something or drive my attention towards something with only one goal: give me your money. We want your money. We love money and we want yours, we want more, give me give me give me.

It is truly putrid, a plague on society akin to having a sociological STD - minus the sex, so it might even be worse. And its non-consensual so continue that analogy as you will.

We need radical policy reforms in privacy and universal “DO NOT MARKET TO ME” option, where, if violated, results in JAIL TIME for whoever clicked “send” on a marketing email, and the same for anyone who order them to click send. Not fines. Jail time. What they are doing is worse, far worse, than some carrying an ounce of weed in their ride.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#75

Post by jwrx »

celestialcheese wrote: post #18
hammock wrote: post #14

Email marketer here. Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their increase in open…

This. Additionally, many enterprise email security providers doing automated phishing checks that click every link in the email and screen scrape the landing page to verify it's not an attack vector. If your market is the govt, schools, or large enterprises, this is absolutely juicing your CTRs. Vanity email metrics are incredibly broken right now - the only numbers that mean anything are frictioned conversions like…

Completely agree. People care too much about vanity metrics because they don't know how to measure what really matters.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#76

Post by Mojmalik »

celestialcheese wrote: post #18
hammock wrote: post #14

Email marketer here. Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their increase in open…

This. Additionally, many enterprise email security providers doing automated phishing checks that click every link in the email and screen scrape the landing page to verify it's not an attack vector. If your market is the govt, schools, or large enterprises, this is absolutely juicing your CTRs. Vanity email metrics are incredibly broken right now - the only numbers that mean anything are frictioned conversions like…

I’m new to email marketing. I’m tracking the CTR locations and they are from unique individual cities and the OS type varies. Does this mean they are more likely actual clicks to the landing page? I’m guessing the email security would come from a similar location vs individual cities and say Linux for OS type?

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#77

Post by ecf »

> This trick was to start sending the emails at the same hour the user last visited our website.

> For example, if a user was last on our website at 3:43pm, then now we send the marketing emails to this user at around 3pm.

There’s 0 chance that this has any real effect on the click rate.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#78

Post by celestialcheese »

Mojmalik wrote: post #76
celestialcheese wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Additionally, many enterprise email security providers doing automated phishing checks that click every link in the email and screen scrape the landing page to verify it's not an attack vector. If your market is the govt, schools, or large enterprises, this is absolutely juicing your CTRs. Vanity email metrics are incredibly broken right now - the only numbers that mean anything are frictioned conversions like…

I’m new to email marketing. I’m tracking the CTR locations and they are from unique individual cities and the OS type varies. Does this mean they are more likely actual clicks to the landing page? I’m guessing the email security would come from a similar location vs individual cities and say Linux for OS type?

Not necessarily - I don't know the details of these security providers, but they could use a proxy scraping service like BrightData, which proxies requests through real users mobile and residential IPs, thus making it look like real users are clicking.

I don't know this exact thing to be happening, but it could, so I don't think using IP location as the signal of "Human vs Not" is accurate.

Using time clustering of clicks vs send is a good one, also I've noticed that these security providers will click _every_ link in the email, all within a few minutes, so filtering out multiple clicks by one IP in a short time frame would work.

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#79

Post by Mojmalik »

celestialcheese wrote: post #78
Mojmalik wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m new to email marketing. I’m tracking the CTR locations and they are from unique individual cities and the OS type varies. Does this mean they are more likely actual clicks to the landing page? I’m guessing the email security would come from a similar location vs individual cities and say Linux for OS type?

Not necessarily - I don't know the details of these security providers, but they could use a proxy scraping service like BrightData, which proxies requests through real users mobile and residential IPs, thus making it look like real users are clicking. I don't know this exact thing to be happening, but it could, so I don't think using IP location as the signal of "Human vs Not" is accurate. Using time clustering of c…

Ahh I see. Sweet thank you!

Re: How we boosted our marketing email open rate

#80

Post by mattpallissard »

hammock wrote: post #14

Email marketer here. Open rates would have naturally trended from 20% to 60% naturally when iOS added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in the last two years, because Apple "opens" the emails itself before you do so that the sender cannot track the metadata associated with the pings to the image servers. Without a timeframe listed on this "trick" I would suspect that MPP was a great contributor to their increase in open…

> I am skeptical of this "trick."

This one trick email providers don't want you to know!

Post reply on HN