An ode to the masses obsessed with open rates

Not long ago on Twitter, a bloke named WiFi Money Guy tagged me in a post about email so-called open rates, and mentioned how it’s easy to be diluted by vanity metrics (like opens) To which I posted: “I was attacked for my vocal distain for email open rates for years - mostly by freelance copywriters who like to dazzle clients & Facebook friends with soft metrics to try to look cool. Those of us running our own lists, offers, etc have always known they are mostly bull shyt.” I say “mostly” because there are obviously some legit uses for tracking opens. But I will also say this: Between 2013 and 2016 I used to co-host some intense hot seat masterminds with Ryan Levesque, Andre Chaperon, & Jack Born. We had 7,8, & 9-figure businesses attend them — including people from companies like Agora Financial, Russell Brunson, etc. Not to mention guests show up to be a part of it like Todd Brown, Rich Schefren, etc. Lots of A-players were in those rooms. But whenever anyone nattered on about open rates, I'd usually interrupt and ask about sales. And every single time it was the same thing: The opens rarely ever correlated with sales. They were just cited and thrown around with no real reason. Total vanity metric. With about as much relevance to the bottom line as their score the last time they played Frogger at an arcade in 1985. Again, there are some legit reasons to track opens if you want. But they have mostly to do with monitoring overall list health. If they drop suddenly, then time to check under the hood to see what's going on. In fact, when Stefania was using a well-known email service, she realized something in the milk wasn’t clean with her list by monitoring the open rates, only to find they weren’t sending her emails to her main list, just her paying customers (which caused a shyt storm in and of itself, and one reason I wanted to co-create BerserkerMail, but that is another story for another time.) So I’m not “against” tracking opens. But if email is the sport, sales should be the score board, in my way of thinking. i.e., not yards run or base hits, but what's putting numbers on the scoreboard. Just for fun during the BerserkerMail’s launch I proved this with my own list. I took a 6 week period of stats from BerserkerMail (my main list) and my shopping cart (where my buyers are), and I took screen shots of both, and put them in my private social media page I had up at the time to show my work. The cart screenshot broke every sale down by product. Didn’t even count sales that came from affiliate promos, licensed deals, or software. Just what went through my cart during that time. It showed a lowly 13% open rate. But $217k in sales. With affiliate promos, software, etc, it was a lot more, but let’s just roll with $217 for simplicity. You could buy a small house in some places with that at the time. You think I gave a flying rat’s puckering bung hole what the “oPeNzzZ!” were? I once had an Email Players subscriber report something similar — where he used my methods to get his client more sales in that December (usually a dead month) than the rest of the year… but wanted my advice on how to get his 9% open rates up. I think he missed the point.. I will say this for the open rate industrial complex guys though: They do a magnificent job brainwashing the masses - especially clients - with open %'s. All right, history lesson over. Since I began this email quoting Twitter, so I will end it with quoting Twitter. Last night I wrote on there that I will likely be doing a bunch of Twitter spaces (audio livestreams) soon about copywriting, email, marketing, etc, whatever else is on my mind. All will be non-scheduled & off-the-cuff. And they'll be free to access if you are listening live, but the recordings will only be available in the upcoming private Email Players mobile app for Email Players subscribers. I'll also do live Q&A's when I do them too, if anyone is up early enough to listen to them. When will these start to happen? I have no idea when I will start doing them. But if/when I do, they will almost certainly happen in the early a.m. hours (4 or 5 or 6 or 7'ish a.m., give or take) PDT on Tuesdays, Fridays, and/or Sundays. And they can only be listened to live on Twitter, as theirs is the software I'm using to record them. Again, I am not sure when I will start doing them. Could be this week, could be next, or a month or two out. But I want to start creating more content. And this will get me back in the game. To connect with me on Twitter to listen live when I do go to: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/twitter]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2023 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA