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 sign-ups, payments, session duration etc.
But auto-clicks seem pretty easy to filter out of reporting data because they happen essentially instantaneously. Just drop clicks that happen within like 10 seconds of delivery.
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.
It’s "spammer". Changing the word doesn’t make what you do less awful.
(and check this nice video: https://youtu.be/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 )
When I think about it on the flipside for small business marketing it's really a tragic scenario of which ad mediums are not perceived as 'spammy'.
None. Marketing is an objective blight on human society.
Because you know, HN is a marketing site for companies in Y Combinator and Y Combinator itself.
Every landing page you have ever visited is marketing.
Every GitHub README.md is marketing.
There's not a single business in the history of mankind that have made money without marketing. Because they wouldn't be allowed to show or tell anyone they existed.
You know, the people directly responsible for making email suck... and the web... and search engines... phone calls... TV... the mail...
Huh. It's almost like the entire industry does a lot of making things suck.
Maybe if that wasn't the case I'd be amenable to considering some form of marketing as acceptable, but time and time again that industry has proven that being a good citizen is just not something they are willing to do.
Also, landing pages are definitely counted because in my experience you're lucky to even be able to tell what the fuck the product is from the landing page, so bullshit laden are they.
That README.md is often used for marketing in the landing-page sense is just evidence of what I said elsethread: That the psychological damage caused by marketing has embedded itself deeply in our culture and become self-perpetuating.
Should non-megacorp specialized services simply not exist? How should they get the word out? The approved channels you speak of are very expensive and highly competitive.
This one trick email providers don't want you to know!
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 rate.
Another thing to note is that most of the big email platforms now offer some kind of automated send-time optimization, which looks at an individual's open behavior over time and adjusts the send time individually for a given campaign to a time that person tends to be most responsive. In Salesforce this is called Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO).
STO really only boosts open rates by 5-10% at most on average (i.e., from 20% to 21-22%), which is another reason why I am skeptical of this "trick."