After we sent out an email campaign, we are interested in the open rate and click rate. Say you sent out 20,000 emails, 2,000 opened, and 200 clicked. You probably have a mental picture of the following:
Deliver-Open-Click
Actually this is not the case. The reality is something like:
Deliver-Open-Click
Noticed that some clicks are outside opens? You may wonder, how is this possible? How can a person click our link but not opening the email? We have to first understand how email sending services (including Biz Genius) tracks opens. When you send your campaign, Biz Genius will append an invisible tiny image in the email. If the email is opened, and if the user enables image display, then our tiny image will be opened and it sends back a message – “the email is opened!”
But we know we ourselves don’t always enable image display in our email. In this case, open can not be tracked. As a consequence, open rate is often under-estimated.
Then the next question is, what is the real open rate? No one knows – but we can have a good estimate. To do this, we did an analysis on a real company. Overtime the company has sent out 99,854 emails, 20,940 opened (21%), 3001 clicked (3%). Then, of the 3001 emails clicked, we found 1148 (38%) of them are not opened. That means the open rate is probably 40% underestimated, and the true open rate in this case is about 21% / (1-40%) = 35%.
Open rate is 40% underestimated
Lesson Learned:
- The open rate is not accurate due to the tracking method.
- The open rate is about 40% underestimated.