Between 27 February and 3 March I sent two newsletters to two different lists (no overlap in subscribers by excluding the first list when sending to the second list). The Newsletter Plugin (TNP) Statistics pages for these two mailings shows a combined Reach of 62,194 messages, of which 2915 have been opened so far; it’s now 8 March. That’s a disappointing open rate of about 4.7%. These were sent using Amazon’s SES service.
Amazon’s SES service provides a Delivery Manager dashboard, which indicates for the same time period 62,076 messages were sent (very close to the number provided by TNP) but it also shows 9,277 Opens. That’s about 15.8%. This is a huge difference.
I’ve been digging through the Amazon documents and I may have found a reason for the difference. If a particular email is opened three separate times, Amazon counts that as three Opens. While it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that with 62,000 emails ~on average~ each email is opened three times. At least that is my best guess. (Amazon does the tracking by inserting a one pixel image served by an Amazon system.)
Does anyone have any experience with SES and their statistics they would like to share? There seems to be an art to sending a lot of emails and I am at the beginning of the learning curve. Thanks for any thoughts.