The percentage of delivered emails recorded as opened, subject to the limitations of email privacy and tracking technology.
A directional email metric that should be interpreted alongside clicks, conversions, and deliverability.
Short and sweet:
The percentage of delivered emails recorded as opened, subject to the limitations of email privacy and tracking technology.
A directional email metric that should be interpreted alongside clicks, conversions, and deliverability.
See also: Click-Through Rate, Email Deliverability, Email Marketing
Open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened a specific email out of everyone it was successfully delivered to, offering an early signal of how compelling a subject line and sender name were before anyone even saw the actual message. Privacy features on major email clients now automatically trigger opens for many messages regardless of whether a person actually read them, which has made open rate a noticeably less reliable metric than it once was. Because of this shift, many marketers now weigh click-through rate and conversions more heavily than open rate when judging whether a campaign actually resonated with its audience.
A retailer sending a Black Friday email blast might see its open rate spike well above the usual average, since the subject line promising a big discount grabs attention in a crowded inbox.
Email platforms like Mailchimp report this figure for every campaign, letting a nonprofit compare whether a subject line mentioning a specific dollar goal performs better than a vaguer appeal.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature has made this number less reliable in recent years, since it can register an email as opened even if the recipient never actually looked at it.
