Understanding email open rates - Part 1
When clients are first introduced to email marketing they are usually thrilled to discover they can see who is opening their emails and what links they are clicking on. It's called tracking and reporting.
But it doesn't take long for that first rush of enthusiasm to be replaced with mild disappointment when they realise there's a whole bunch of people receiving their emails, but not opening them. "Why?", they ask. "What happened?"
What is an open rate?
Your open rate is the percentage of people on your list who opened your email. It's that simple. Good reporting should also give you the number of unique opens, ensuring that no recipient is counted twice regardless of how many times they have opened your email.
Your service has a number of ways of tracking this data, but one of the most common is inserting a 'web beacon' into your email. It's usually something like a single pixel (very small) clear image. You can't see it because it's within the programming of the email. As soon as a recipient opens your email, a request for the graphic is sent to the server and recorded. Your statistics are updated and you can then track activity on a real-time basis. Watching the numbers change can be very addictive.
Not all opens are counted
There's a few different reasons why an email open may not get recorded on your statistics. For the open to register, the web beacon image must be displayed by your recipient's email reader. So text-only emails can't be tracked. If your recipient has turned off the ability to view images in their email reader (by choice or default) they also cannot be tracked. Emails read on handheld devices like a Blackberry usually aren't counted either.
Another class of 'unrecorded opens' are emails sent to corporate addresses. Some businesses and government departments have server tools installed that block web beacons, so you won't be able to record them. This is partly why open rates on B2B email marketing communications are often less that B2C open rates.
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