A glance at open rates would give the impression that users are
opening a lot less e-mails than they did one year ago. But DoubleClick,
in their recent E-mail Trend Report, believes that the reason for the
decline is less about a change in the number of clicks than the effect
of image blocking technology used by many e-mail programs. Since
DoubleClick measures open rates by tracking image calls in
HTML-formatted e-mails, image blocking obviously affects this metric.
However, the lowered rates may in fact be more representative of
the truth, according to DoubleClick. Before image blocking, many e-mails
may have registered as "opened" when they had merely shown up
in an e-mail preview window as a user scrolled through e-mails or
clicked on them before deleting. The relative stability of click and
conversion rates supports this view.
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