How to Calculate Your Email Open Rates

Email marketing requires significant effort and time, extending beyond creating and sending emails. It is equally important to measure and analyze the performance of email campaigns. By monitoring key performance indicators, you can determine if your strategy is effective and identify where improvements can be made.

One of the most important email marketing metrics to track is the email open rate. A good open rate indicates that your audience finds the subject line engaging enough to open your email, while a low rate suggests that you need to make your subject lines more attractive.

In this guide, we’ll focus on how you can calculate your email open rates, how they are tracked and even discuss what a good email open rate is across various industries.

What is an email open rate?

Email open rate measures the percentage of recipients who open an email compared to the total number of emails delivered. It indicates how effectively your subject lines and preheaders capture the readers' attention.

Why is tracking email open rate important?

Tracking open rate of your email campaigns is important as it helps determine how interested readers are in your content and the number of people who engage with your emails.

This metric provides insights specifically into the effectiveness of your email subject lines and preheaders. It helps you understand whether they attracted the recipient’s interest and convinced them to open the email. This information can also help you optimize your future campaigns.

Tracking email open rates and identifying and fixing issues leading to consistently low email open rates can also help you identify email deliverability issues like low sender score, IP reputation, domain reputation, and so on.

How to calculate email open rate

You can calculate the email open rate using the open rate formula below.

Let’s understand this better with an example.

Let's say you sent 50 emails to contacts in your mailing list, 10 of which bounced, 40 of which were delivered, and 15 of those 40 delivered emails were opened. Here's how you would calculate the open rate.

What is a good open rate for email?

The email open rate varies depending on the industry, audience, and campaign. Ideally, it should be 15-20%. According to the State of Email 2024 report, the average open rate for all industries is 18.5%. The table below shows the industry-wide email open rates for last year.

How is the email open rate tracked?

This process of email open rate tracking involves using tracking pixels to gather data on how recipients interact with the emails. Let's learn how.

An email tracking pixel is a 1px by 1px square image inserted into an email, either in the header, footer, or main message of the email. You can manually insert the tracking pixel code before the tag in the email or use an email tracking pixel generator to create a transparent 1px by 1px square image and embed it into the email message.

When the recipient opens the emails, the pixel loads, sending a signal to the server that the email has been opened. This pixel further helps marketers monitor their subscribers' interactions, allowing email service providers to show data for open rates and clicks.

Note: Tracking pixels do not collect confidential information such as bank details or private browsing history. They only track your interaction with the specific email in which they were embedded.

Email marketing platforms such as Mailmodo offer advanced email tracking and display a detailed view of your email campaign’s performance. They track important email metrics such as open rate, bounce rate, click rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribes.

All these metrics are represented visually, making it easy to comprehend and analyze trends. You can also export this data in .xls or .csv format for creating reports and sharing across teams.

Impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection on email open rates

On 7 June 2021, Apple announced new privacy protection in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey to offer users more secure and controlled access to their data. The company has always prioritized privacy, providing users with robust features to manage their data securely. The Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature in the Mail app prevents senders from using invisible pixels to gather user information. It ensures senders cannot determine when an email is opened and masks the user’s IP address to prevent it from being linked to any other online activity.

Privacy has been central to our work at Apple from the very beginning. Every year, we push ourselves to develop new technology to help users take more control of their data and make informed decisions about whom they share it with. This year’s updates include innovative features that give users deeper insights and more granular control than ever before.

-Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering

Since Apple preloads emails on its proxy servers, it triggers the tracking pixel embedded in the email. This can result in a 100% open rate even if they don’t open your email which basically translates to inflated open rates in Apple. The higher the percentage of your audience using Apple Mail, the more inflated open rates you can expect. As open rates become less accurate, marketers need to rethink how they should track metrics for email marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the importance of email open rates, you must focus on improving them. Tracking open rates helps you find if your content is resonating with the audience and what changes you can make to obtain better results.

Try using attractive subject lines and if you can’t think of one, you can use Mailmodo’s free AI subject line generator. Additionally, send emails when people are most likely to engage and segment your target audience for more targeted messaging.