Top Left Designs

Making your business work better in a digital world

  • Home
  • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Topleft Design
  • Capabilities
    • What we do
    • CRM Solutions
  • Resources
    • FAQ
    • Articles
  • Contact Us

Call Us: (07) 5526 4014

Mobile: 0419 706 325

Suite 205
'The Scarborough Centre'
89 Scarborough St,
Southport Queensland 4215 Australia

My Account
FOLLOW US
Gold Coast Web Development Agency
Delivering quality traffic and sales leads through impressive website design and effective digital marketing initiatives

Marketing your business in a complex digital world

Gold Coast

(07) 5526 4014

What is the open rate in your e-mail marketing?

  1. Home
  2. What is the open rate in your e-mail marketing?
What is the open rate in your e-mail marketing?

What is the open rate in your e-mail marketing?

{tag_blogpostmetadescription} True
What is the open rate in your e-mail marketing? What is the open rate in your e-mail marketing?
01Sep
2013

Many people quite understandably are confused about their open rate statistics in their e-mail marketing campaigns. Understanding what this content you will greatly assist you in achieving improved open rates for your future campaigns.

Any reputable e-mail marketing system, such as we use with Business Catalyst, or other systems such as MailChimp and iContact, will provide you with a range of statistics about your e-mail campaigns.

Two that cause considerable confusion are:

  • Total Opens - this is the total number of times your e-mail is opened by anyone. If you sent it to 20 people of which 10 opened it and 4 of those opened it twice than the total opens equals 10 + 4 = 14.
  • Unique Opens - this is the number of unique people who open your e-mail and does not concern itself with how often they opened. In the above case, unique opens equals 10.

How Are E-Mail Opens Tracked

Because of the lack of standardisation across all different e-mail systems, the mechanism for tracking how often your e-mail is opened is rather simple.

A very small and invisible graphic image measuring just one pixel square is embedded in the e-mail. Code on the mail servers is able to determine how often this image is downloaded from the server to be viewed within your e-mail.  All very straight forward actually.

The Issue With The Simplicity Of Tracking E-Mail Opens

Whilst it may appear simple and straightforward this is also what makes the results you get quite deceptive and inaccurate. Why would that be? For reasons below we can't rely specifically on the numbers given.

  • E-mail clients set to not display images - in many clients you can disable display of images. If this is the case tracking image is not display and therefore the e-mail open is not counted
  • E-mails are opened as text only - some clients view e-mails as text only and therefore the tracking image again is not displayed nor counted in your open rate.
  • Preview e-mail gets multiple opens - if you preview your e-mail such as in Outlook or Yahoo, then the tracking image will be displayed on your open count is increment. This is why you see some people opening your e-mail a dozen times. In reality these are probably previews and they only actually open the e-mail to read once.
  • Forwarded e-mails - these can produce a slightly different issue depending on how they are forward. Whilst they will be treated as a separate unique open, if you are tracking how many times a particular person opens an e-mail, the person to whom it was poured may be treated as the original recipient.

So How Can You Make Use Of Open Rates

the first thing to remember is that the rates in themselves are of limited value. Comparing rates to previous campaigns or other e-mail marketing Systems is however perfectly valid and encouraged.

The second thing is that you should be primarily looking at the unique open rate not the overall rate. What you should look at is the unique open rate ratio:

Ratio = Unique opens / Total No recipients

What Constitutes A Good Open Rate Ratio

The question that is on everybody's lips and unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule to be followed. As you establish credibility with your mail list and subject to the quality of your newsletters your rates will vary. Ideally your rate should improve/increase as time goes by.

As a general rule of thumb, a 20% unique open rate ratio is considered a good start.

2013-Sep-01 2199
https://www.topleftdesigns.com.au/my-assets/img/blogs/email-open-rates.jpg 300 300 Written by: Greg Tomkins

Published by: Top Left Designs on 2013-Sep-01

https://www.topleftdesigns.com.au/_Assets/images/topleftdesigns_logo_h.jpg 379 118
Greg Tomkins https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GregTomkins

This Article Tags

  • #Analytics
  • #email marketing - newsletters
  • #Inbound Marketing
  • #tips
  • #traffic

Other Recent Posts

25Sep
2021

How you should be sending every email in your business

We all send out 100’s of emails from our business every week if not every day.  Each one of these emails is a touch point with your market be it direct or indirect.&...

initiatives, Marketing, positioning, sales, / Read more
How Zoho CRM can help you manage all your critical business information.
15May
2018

How Zoho CRM can help you manage all your critical business information.

There is no secret in the fact that in order to achieve success and grow your business, it is essential to have systems in place founded on sound business processes.

Business leaders...

business process, Zoho, / Read more
Zoho ONE for Professional Services
15May
2018

Zoho ONE for Professional Services

I always say that there is no better way to provide a product and having used yourself first.Only then can you relate to the experience your customers will go through themselves.

Bef...

Case Study, Zoho, / Read more
You Can’t Afford To Be Complacent About Cyber Security
22Apr
2018

You Can’t Afford To Be Complacent About Cyber Security

Back in 1999 I worked with a number of companies performing Y2K Audits for SME businesses and now I find that we are facing an even bigger threat. According to Damian Seaton of Security, / Read more

Qld Gov't Open Round 4 of Digital Grants
24Mar
2018

Qld Gov't Open Round 4 of Digital Grants

Right now the Queensland Government is just opened up Round 4 of its Small Business Digital Grants Program offering up to $10,000 towards the cost of purchasing hardware, software and servic...

grants, / Read more

Follow us on:

Greg Tomkins

Greg Tomkins

Follow Me

No author biography available.

Share this Post

Other Post Tags

Leave a Comment

Latest Posts

Gold Coast Web Development Agency


We are an Authorised Zoho Partner, who work to a single purpose of providing professional expertise to SME businesses looking to implement Zoho ONE or any selection of its 45+ applications

OFFICE
Suite 205
'The Scarborough Centre'
89 Scarborough St,
Southport Queensland 4215 Australia

Phone: (07) 5526 4014
Mobile: 0419 706 325

Find Us at:
       

Popular Posts

    No posts available yet
 

Capabilities

  • Who we are
  • Zoho Consulting
  • Strategic IT Planning
  • Business Aligned Priorities
  • Implementation Roadmaps
  • Zoho Implementationn

Copyright © 2013 By Top Left Designs. All Rights Reserved. This website developed with Adobe Business Catalyst CMS. We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. Please visit Terms & Conditions section establishing the use, Disclaimers, Privacy & limitations of liability governing the use of our website.

Zoho - The Business Operating System

One of the world's leading CRM solutions forming the core of over 45 integrated Zoho applications used by over 100 million users world wide

-->