In this week’s Only Influencers newsletter, Gretchen Scheiman of L5 Direct provides 5 steps for marketers to follow to improve open rates. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend checking it out for some sound advice on how to drive higher open rates. (Go ahead, read it. I’ll wait.)

There are a lot of things I like in this article – primarily, I appreciate calling out poor content and lack of targeting as major factors in open rates. I’ve seen so many marketers make an immediate assumption that any dip in open rates is attributable to delivery problems – and they’re often wrong. Poor inbox delivery is likely to negatively impact open rates, without a doubt. But if you’re not sending the right content to the right people at the right time, they’re less likely to open no matter where the message ends up.

With that said, there is one fundamental disagreement I felt compelled to point out. In discussing list acquisition, the article calls out best practices for using purchased lists. While purchased lists may still be fairly prevalent, especially among B2B senders, avoiding these lists should be the number 1 suggestion to remedy poor open rates. Mailing to purchased lists has been shown time and time again to generate poor ROI and low open rates. It increases your chances of spam complaints and traps, and is actually illegal in Canada.

If you are seeing low open rates, the first thing on the chopping block should be any purchased lists. Once that’s done, you will be able to focus on better content, targeting, and re-engagement of your valuable internal database.

– BG