Truth about Open Rate: What It Really Means
G-Lock Analytics email tracking service provides you with detailed reports on how people act upon their emails: who opened the message, who clicked on the links within the message and what links were clicked.
But when you receive the first statistics and start deciphering your open rate reports, some questions may arise. In fact, open rate reports are not as accurate and straightforward as people expect them to be.
With that said, let’s look more closely at what open rate is, how it is calculated and how we should interpret our open rate reports.
An open is an indication that the email was opened by the user. When you want to track the email opens, you include a tiny transparent image into the email source. Or, if you use our email marketing software, G-Lock EasyMail automatically adds a tracking image into your email source. This image is invisible to the recipient but it’s very important because when this image is displayed, a signal is sent to the tracking service that counts an open.
So, an email is considered as opened when the image is displayed. An open rate is the percentage of those subscribers on your list who enabled the images to be loaded into the email. This percentage is calculated based on the number of unique opens, i.e. if the recipient opened the email several times, only one “open” is counted.
Note that an open rate report gives you only an approximate number of recipients who opened your message. If a subscriber chooses not to display the images in the email, or if he/she receives the emails in the plain-text format only, the open will not be counted.
And there is the opposite case. The subscriber can have the images turned on so the tracking image automatically loads even if the email is displayed in the preview pane. The open is counted though the subscriber did not read it actually.
So, due to the fact that many email services, in particular AOL and Gmail, do not automatically display the images, your open rate may be higher than your report shows.
The average open rate can vary from 10% to 60% depending on business and organization. But better if you don’t focus on the numbers received by others but analyze the results you got from your previous campaigns. Think about what works for your subscribers. And look at your click rate to understand what part of your email interested people the most. Here you can discover a couple of great tips how you can get more clicks for your links.
You may also notice that your open rate is getting lower with time. It's normal because your subscribers are curious what you are sending them in first emails. With time they become accustomed to your newsletters and their curiosity may be getting lower. But if you are constantly populating your list, new curious members will recoup less active old subscribers. If you don’t have a signup form on your website yet, it’s the right time to add it. Just take a look at G-Lock Opt-In Manager plugin. This WordPress plugin will put a submit form to your WordPress blog and allow you collect subscribers using a double opt-in method.
Well, you understand now that an open rate report gives you only a general idea of how the recipients treated your email. Don’t trust blindly those numbers and always remember that the real quantity of recipients who opened your message is slightly different (most likely it will be higher what is a good news).
However, if you find your open rate report frustrating from campaign to campaign, it’s time to think maybe you are doing something wrong since your message is not being opened by the majority of subscribers. At this point you can start taking some steps at optimizing your email and improving your open rate.
Now I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts. What did you try? What worked best? What failed? Leave me a comment below and let’s discuss.
Tags: click rate, email marketing software, get more clicks, improve open rate, open rate, track the email opens
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Filed under: Email Tracking