3 Email Best Practices you should reconsider(II): Optimising open rate

Among the Best Practices reviewed by Dela Quist in his webminar "Approach with caution: 3 email best practices to think twice about"and after analysing the first point  (A/B Test) in the previous article. We find in second place:

 Optimise the open rate
People are obsessed with getting higher open rates and they succeed segmenting lists to provide relevant information to your users. Thus, if we send an email to 100 people and get a 70% open rate we will be satisfied, and conversely, if on a list of 100,000 we get a 5% open rate. Quist recommends not losing sight of the total numbers and stop looking at rates or percentages that do not provide such valuable information. In other words, we should be able to see that a rate of 5% out of 100,000 reaches 5,000 users and a rate of 70% out of 100 reaches only 70.
Moreover, as Quist pointed out when he talked about A/B testing, we must be very aware of whether what we really need is to optimise the opening or whether we are interested in optimise conversionThe two are not equivalent variables and the effort directed at optimising open rates may not contribute anything to email conversion.
Dela Quist is in favour of list size and the need for mass mailings, although he qualifies that segmentation is important. In any case, we must balance our outreach objectives with the care of the IP reputation, as we have seen in previous articles. We recommend listening to the webinar to better understand their position.