Open Rate

/ Jeff Cann

In a library meeting yesterday with a consultant: “So this newsletter you send out, how many people receive the email?”

“Twenty thousand, but only seven thousand open it.”

“Wow, that’s a great open rate.”

It’s the first time I heard these figures. I’m finance, not marketing. At work, someone else worries about website stats. But the consultant is right, thirty-five percent sounds impressive to me. It made me wonder, what’s my open rate.

In June, WordPress tweaked their stats page… again. I’m a bit perplexed by how often I open WordPress and find things different. Remember last winter when they made it so you couldn’t like a post while browsing a tag? You had to at least open a post (and preferably read it) before you could like it. I appreciate that. I’m forever frustrated when I open WordPress and see my notification dot, but when I click the bell, I see that BestKetoRecipies liked a post that no one read that day.

I suppose WordPress got gobs of complaints, “Hey, no one is liking my posts anymore!” They undid that fix in about a month. The change in June was interesting. Suddenly my stats page shows me how many of my subscription emails are sent and opened. My last post, Mayonnaise Vignette, went to 2,300 subscribers. Of those, 803 opened it. Hmmm, that’s thirty-five percent, just like the library. Maybe that’s not impressive. Maybe it’s just the industry standard.

Know what those 803 people got? They got my post title and the first three lines of text—and then a link that says Read more of this post. If they click the link, they travel to my blog. But no one does that. Well, actually five or six people usually do. One time twenty-seven did, but I have no idea why. The rest just open the email, and then I guess they delete it. I often wonder about that. If they aren’t going to read the post, why waste the time to open the email. There’s no mystery about what it is. A couple of these emails arrive every week. “Oh look, I got a post from The Other Stuff. Now I can open the email just to delete it. I’ve been looking forward to doing this all week.”

Until 2017, my entire blogpost emailed out to my subscribers. But I became frustrated by how few people visited my blog. And why would they visit, I reasoned, they already read the post. I figured if I sent out a three-line teaser, everyone would click through to read the rest of the post. But, like I already said, they don’t.

My blogging goals have changed since 2017. Now, instead of drawing people to my blog, I just want to be read. I publish in a variety of places: my blog, newspapers, news websites, online periodicals, and the library newsletter. Often, a piece shows up in more than one location. I have no idea how many people read each of my posts. But I like feeling widely read, even if I can’t quantify it. I figure if I make it easier on the 2,300 people who get emails from me, I can pretend more people read my posts.

For my first emailed post, I wanted to create a beautiful creative nonfiction story, but this fact-based post is what sprung from my fingers. Sorry, maybe next time. If you’re so inclined, let me know what you think of getting the whole post emailed to you. Did it change how you read the post? Did it encourage you to read the post when you typically delete it? Or are you like me, and you’ve opted out of all email subscriptions and only read blogs from the WordPress reader.

Regardless, thanks for reading.

Edited: Sigh, that didn’t work. The feed only sent out the first three lines again. Back to the drawing board.

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

23 thoughts on “Open Rate”

  1. It’s different. I have email subscriptions that I read directly from my email but it offers no option to like without having to sign in all the time so I just use the Jetpack app then like and comment from there because I’ve already read it. Sometimes.. I miss stuff because notifications are weird 😕

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  2. I generally go to the site to leave a like or comment. If I’m lurking, I just read if it’s available, or go to the site if I have time and bandwidth. I guess my answer is best summed up with 🤷🏼‍♀️
    I haven’t looked at my own site in a while. I hope things haven’t changed too much!

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  3. I suppose if only the first three lines of your posts are appearing, you could start writing haiku and you’d be covered. 😀 I’m with you as far as just wanting to be read. I stopped looking at numbers when I first discovered folks could like a post without even reading it. That sort of disillusioned me. Now, overall numbers mean little to me. I just enjoy when people leave a comment as that shows they read my post and were willing to take time to interact with me. It’s a good feeling. And yeah, that BestKetoRecipes bit really resonates with me! 😀

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    • Yes, wordpress is rife with garbage stats. I also highly doubt the open rate stats they provide, but it’s the only number I got. Regarding BestKetoRecipies, since putting that in my post, I’ve had a never ending parade of spam commenters hawking keto recipes. I fell right into their trap.

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  4. You’re way in front of me. My open rate is around one quarter of my WordPress and email followers combined. Admittedly, a good proportion are promoting services and products I’ll never buy, so the adjusted figure is probably more like 35%…

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  6. i opt out of all email subscriptions and only read in the reader. i have noted that some people do the opposite of what you appear to be doing– meaning, when i open up to read in the reader, they give the first few sentences and then a line that says something like: to read the full article, visit the website page. if that happens, i unfollow the person. why make things harder for people to read your stuff?

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    • I think it’s sort of funny (strange) how they make all of these software changes without any notification or fanfare or even an explanation of what it means, and you’re force to figure it out on your own (which usually takes me weeks).

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  8. I’m one of the people who opens the email, reads the few lines that are there and then clicks “Read more of this post” to read the rest of it. Though sometimes I open the email, read the few lines, then go to my PC to read the entire post because I don’t like reading things on my phone.

    Did the number of your followers grow gradually over time, or did specific events or posts cause surges in followers?

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    • I got off to a pretty slow start with followers on wordpress. After a couple of years, wordpress promoted one of my posts in their “discover series” (not sure if they still have that) and I had a rather viral moment where I picked up over a thousand followers overnight. For the past several weeks, I’ve been picking up ten or more followers a day, but they generally have unreadable names and no blog linked, and they aren’t reading a post before following. This also happened about a year ago as well. I sent a message to wordpress asking them what was up, and it stopped completely and I didn’t get a single follower for weeks. There’s a lot of spammy garbage on wordpress. It’s hard to take any of the stats seriously. I’d estimate that out of my 5000ish ‘followers’ only about 50 people actually read my blog, which to me sounds like a good number and I’m usually pretty happy with it.

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  9. Regarding commenting on posts outside of the Jetpack reader, in your “site settings” you can go to “discussion” and under comments, there’s options you can turn off that requires someone commenting to provide name and email, and another that requires users to log in. It may help to disable them.
    As for myself, I turn off email notifications and read and comment via the reader. Too much email otherwise.

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