[epub] Re: Newsletter Open-rate tracking

["Sharon & Roy Montero" <iwomen@xxxxxxxx>]

On 5 May 02, at 20:46, drmani@vsnl.com wrote:

>In surgery, we have a saying: "Any fool can decide to operate - it
>takes a surgeon to know when *not* to operate."
>
>I'm more focused on the *why* rather than the *how*
>
>In the earlier thread, there were no convincing arguments made to
>support the need for tracking ezine 'open rates'. Would any list
>members who find it overwhelmingly important to track open rates 
>of their newsletters please post to the list with their opinions 
>and comments regarding this *apparently* vital statistic for 
>e-publishers?

Hi Mani,

Well, not sure how vital it would be to others, but we know that
the average open rate for any publication is not going to be 100%.

So if we are asked to pay $10 CPM and they "claim" to have 30,000
subscribers and we have actual stats of enough publications to
give us a national or global average (sort of like the Net Ratings
or Nielson's to measure viewers for Web sites and TV) we may end
up with some "bargaining power" to where we may only have to pay
for 50% or 70% or whatever that average number turns out to be
instead of the full asking price of various publications. 

We are fairly confident that most publishers would see the logic in
this and if they don't sell all their ad space, that they would 
accept our offer to pay a reduced price.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this, whether pro or con?

Last year sometime we read a statement made by a large Web site
that was selling ads for their eZine of over 30,000 subscribers.

Their claim was that they had an 'open rate' of more than 50% when
the national or global average was only around 10%.

We were "shocked" by those statistics and so we went to a few of
the more popular forums to confirm those figures. To our surprise
no one knew the average open rate nor did anyone even care to give
us their best educated guess.

Judging by our own subscriptions (and we are subscribed to over 100
newsletters and discussion lists) the average open rate of 10% is
just about right, but for folks with only a few subscriptions, we'd
sure like to think that the average would be higher, and maybe a
rate of 50% would be a good one to go by.

Other factors would of course also be taken into consideration such
as is the publication a voluntary double-opt-in one or is it one
where you MUST remain subscribed in order to take advantage of
another feature such as maybe free entrance to a members only
area or did they subscribe to ONLY get a free bonus and then just
delete each issue as it arrives or are they filtering it to go 
straight in to the trash folder whereby the soon forget that they
are even subscribed to it?

And while we are on this subject, we'd love to hear from any of you
who care to give your educated guess on what the national or global
open rate average might be and would that number be similar for the
smaller subscriber based publications as well as the larger ones?



Sharon and Roy Montero - http://www.iwon.net/pin-pals/
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