The opening rate

What is the opening rate ?

In email marketing, the the opening rate of a marketing message (open rate (in English), it is the percentage of openers (number of people who opened the message) out of the number of messages delivered.

It is an indicator of the performance of the message, and more specifically of its purpose.
Indeed, it is the quality of the item that can encourage recipients to open the messages.
The higher this rate, the more successful the campaign is considered to be.
This allows you to measure the interest of recipients and their commitment to opening a message from your brand.

$$\text{Open Rate}= {{\text{Number of Openers}\over\text{Number of Messages Delivered}}*100}$$

Un example calculation

An email campaign was delivered to 10.000 recipients and it was found that 2.000 of them opened the message.

$$\text{Open Rate}= {{\text{2.000}\over\text{10.000}}*100}=20\%$$

So the open rate (OR) is 20%.

Note 1: A common mistake is to calculate this ratio using the number of opens (instead of the number of openers). However, a recipient may have opened the same message multiple times (for example, first on their mobile phone, then a second time on their desktop computer).
To compare open rates, you must ensure they are calculated under the same conditions. In this case, you should count "unique opens" (meaning your measurement only considers the first open in this calculation).

Note 2: Email opens are most often measured by inserting a tracking pixel (a transparent image 1 pixel on each side). This means that users whose email software blocks images by default will not be counted until they have either accepted the display of images or clicked on a link. This limitation is generally known and accepted by marketers.

An increasingly unreliable indicator

Email open rates are a key indicator for measuring recipient engagement with sent messages. However, with the implementation of email privacy protection, such as the privacy features introduced by some email providers, and in particular Apple it becomes more difficult to accurately measure this commitment.

Indeed, email privacy protection aims to protect users by blocking the tracking of email opens and other data related to user activity. This can include remote image loading, tracking pixels, and other techniques used to measure email opens.

As a result, email senders may see a decrease in the open rate reported in their statistics, as many users have enabled this privacy protection feature.
Conversely, to protect their users, some ESPs download remote content in the background even before recipients have seen the message, which can have the effect of loading the tracking pixel and thus artificially inflating the open rate.
All of this can make it difficult to accurately assess the actual engagement of the recipients.

Strategic changes to consider

These same privacy protection measures render the automated reminder systems for those who opened or did not openPrecisely because measuring open rates is no longer accurate enough. If you have implemented such measures with your router/email provider, we advise you to contact them and consider new strategies.

Shippers must therefore adapt their measurement methods and prioritize other engagement indicatorssuch as link click-through rates, conversions, or subsequent recipient actions, to gain a better understanding of the impact of their email campaigns.

Of course, it is always very important for senders to follow best practices regarding consent and email personalization in order to encourage recipient engagement and maintain a positive relationship with them, even without being able to accurately measure email open rates.