“What is the open rate?” The daunting question that never seems to go away. There is always so much stress over open rates with email campaigns. The obvious reason is the message will never be seen if people don’t open their emails. So we spend most of our time crafting a subject line that we hope would be appealing enough to increase the open rate by another 2%, totaling up to 4.5%.

Now consider this. What if there is a communication medium (channel) that generates an above 70% open rate every single time. “What is this mythical medium?” you may ask. Think about the routine you go through after getting home from work everyday. What does it consist of? You take off your shoes, grab your favorite drink, may or may not flip through the TV… one thing that is for certain is you sort through the mail.

According to the USPS, 98% of the people bring in the mail the day it is delivered and 77% of them sort through it immediately (USPS direct mail research). So theoretically 77% of the delivered mail is at least seen by one member of each household on the day it is delivered. If the open rate measures how many people has seen the message, then direct mail will have a greater than 70% open rate on average.

If open rates is the only concern, isn’t it much easier to just send out direct mail. You no longer have to spend countless hours coming up with a subject line, worry about spam filters, or be concerned with HTML specs for different email client services.

Keep in mind I am only talking about open rates. High open rates alone don’t generate high response rates.

-Willv