The Truth About Open Rates

Email marketing0 comments

If you are using email marketing to promote your business then you know that one of the key things that you need to track after each campaign is to see who is opening and interacting with your emails.   Now many business owners get very discouraged when they see the low percentage of people opening their emails.  They wonder if it’s worth the effort to send out campaigns that only 20-30% of their list is opening. 

If this sounds like you, then here’s some information about open rates that you probably didn’t know.

Your open rate isn’t your real open rate.

The way open rates are calculated means that they are a highly unreliable way of measuring who has actually opened your emails.  The open rate is actually a ratio of the number of people who opened your email divided by the total number of emails delivered.

When you send out a newsletter via an email marketing program, the software automatically adds a small invisible image to each email.  When this invisible image shows up on the server then this counts as the email being opened.  However, many people use email browsers that block images by default, eg Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo.  That means that if people select not to see images on their emails by default then it will not count as an open when they receive your newsletter.   This also goes for people who have selected to receive plain text emails from you when signing up to your mailing list.

This means that your open rate could be affected by as much as 35%!

However, before you abandon open rates altogether, they are still a useful metric to track.  Look out to see if your open rates rise or fall dramatically and analyse what you did differently if that happens.  You can also use your open and click through rates to carry out split tests on the best date/time to send your newsletters and which subject lines are the most effective.

However, don’t get too hung up on open rates if they are low – a lot more people could be engaging with your content than you realise!

Valerie Eaton is a virtual assistant who provides online admin and marketing support to small business owners and self-employed professionals who are feeling overwhelmed by their workload and want more time to focus on growing their business.

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