What Is Email Open Rate?

Email open rate is the percentage of emails that your brand's subscribers open.

How Do You Calculate Email Open Rate?

To calculate email open rate, divide the total number of emails you sent by the numbers of emails that were opened. You can also calculate this by dividing the total number of subscribers who have opened an email by the total number of subscribers that email was sent to.

Are Email Opens Dead? Does Email Open Rate Still Matter?

Apple's iOS 15 update allowed iOS users to turn off email tracking. Many folks in email marketing and eCommerce thought that this would lead to dramatically lower open rates across the board, leaving this metric useless. As it turns out, email open rates skyrocketed. Unfortunately, this also rendered the metric useless.

Why did open rates skyrocket?

Here's how open rate tracking used to work: Email Service Providers would track email opens by using a 1x1 pixel in the email, and when people opened an email, a request would be made to retrieve the image. Now, Apple automatically requests all images when an email is delivered, and the effect is that it looks like iOS users are opening all their email.

Grieve opens, but carry on. Focus on more meaningful metrics (click-through rate). Measure email performance differently.

We're about to get controversial: email opens are useful, but they are not necessary. It's definitely nice to be able to track your email open rates, but your business will not go under. When compared to click-through rate, email opens are closer to a vanity metric because if somebody clicks on the content of your email, that click is the most reliable indicator that the content is engaging. 

Start measuring your email performance based on click-through rate. Now, the evaluation of your brand's email performance must be based on one question: did someone click?