Are you always asking yourself the question, “how is the open rate measured?”
The purpose of an open rate is to show how much your campaign can get a user to open an email and start reading.
Open rate is not expressed as an absolute number but as a ratio. The Financebode system measures the opening rate according to the following formula:
Number of recipients who opened the email
—————————————— ————————
Total number of campaign recipients
It doesn’t matter if the recipient opens the email once or multiple times. Only the first opening of each recipient is counted towards the opening rate.
Read more about the 10 things you overthink about Email marketing
How is the email open rate calculated? For instance, if you send out 100 emails and two of them bounce, that leaves 80 emails that were delivered.
If 40 of those emails were opened, your open rate would be 4/8, which is 0.5. That offers you a 50% available email rate when multiplied by 100. Let’s learn more about the available email rate
Why open rate?
Open rate is introduced so that you can use it to compare the persuasiveness and trustworthiness of different campaigns that have other numbers of recipients.
Simply put, it converts the number of unique recipients who opened an email from absolute numbers to relative quantities.
Multiple emails opened by one recipient will not affect the open rate
One recipient can open the email multiple times. For example, you view the email in a preview window (e.g. in Outlook when browsing messages), which is counted as an opening.
Subsequently, he opens the email in full screen (clicks to view the detail), which is counted as a second opening. Or the recipient can return to the email several times at an interval of several hours or days and open it repeatedly.
However, multiple openings will not affect the opening rate because only the first opening of each recipient is always counted.
How is the open rate technically measured?
Email opens are measured through an invisible image that is embedded in the email. When the image is downloaded from the server, the opening of the email is recorded.
A sample of the available statistics of the implemented campaign
Does the opening rate correspond to the exact number of openings?
Due to the technical possibilities of measurement, the opening rate does not correspond to the exact number of email opens.
The image can only be inserted into HTML emails. In the case of purely text emails (plain/text), the number of openings cannot be measured at all.
Another thing that distorts the opening is that some email programs block the display of images by default, and the user must manually enable their display (downloaded from the server).
If it does, email opens won’t be measured. The number of openings needs to reflect reality precisely.
So what is the open rate?
Although the open rate does not correspond to the actual number of opens, it is a very important metric. It allows us to evaluate trends and compare individual campaigns.
It would be preferable if you tried to increase your open rate as much as possible. If you find that your last campaign has a better available rate than the second to last campaign (an upward trend), then you are on the right track and have succeeded in improving the effectiveness of your email marketing.
So always follow the trends and don’t settle for absolute numbers.
Are open rates affected by click-throughs?
Some email marketing tools also count click-throughs in the open rate.
Clicking on the link is then also understood as opening the email and will affect the opening rate.
However, this concept is disadvantageous for several reasons, which we will discuss below.
The Mailchimp system, therefore, does count clicks into the opening rate, and this is an intention, not an omission of an option.
Read more on why Mailchimp is the best for email campaigns.
Why is it wrong to count click-through rates as well?
The open rate should describe, in particular, the motivation of the user to open the email and the trend of how many people did it (the success of the “come and open” persuasion).
On the other hand, the open rate should be as little related as possible to the internal content of the email.
The factors that influence it are mainly factors that we will call external factors:
- Sender credibility,
- email credibility,
- the quality of the relationship with the recipient (expectations and previous experience of the recipient),
- targeting quality (segmentation) and database quality,
- email subject,
- email format affecting the first impression (graphics, data size, usability),
- beginning of the message (introductory paragraph).
The opening rate should help you optimize the above factors and isolate them as much as possible from other factors.
At the moment when we start counting clicks into the open rate, we also have to take into account other factors, which we call internal factors:
- Current contribution and informational value for readers,
- bid price,
- message length,
- number of links,
- link addresses,
- …and more.
The click-through rate is mainly used to optimize the internal factors, and it is ideal not to include them in the opening rate.
Because then the internal factors unnecessarily extend into the set of external factors (the elements merge into the same set), and the opening rate is distorted.
Because it is behind the external factors and, moreover, behind internal factors, this approach will then make it difficult for us to optimize external factors thanks to the reduced isolation.
Of course, email marketing optimization always needs to be understood as a whole, and it is not possible to focus only on internal or external factors.
However, it is advisable to define what each metric shows the most and what influences it the most at the same time.
These things should then be addressed first and only at the moment when we know that we have optimized them from a narrow point of view to look at the click-through rate from a broader point of view (and from the point of view of more metrics). Click here.
