What is Open Rate?

Open rate is the share of delivered emails that are recorded as opened, and it’s one of the least reliable numbers in email because the tracking can’t tell a person from a mail server.

At a glance

• Formula: open rate = recorded opens ÷ delivered emails × 100.
• Opens are counted with a tiny tracking image. When the image loads, the platform logs an open.
• Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection loads that content in the background when a message arrives, so opens get logged that no person made.
• Google says it doesn’t track open rates and that a low open rate isn’t necessarily a sign of a deliverability problem.
• For sales email, reply rate and held meetings are the numbers to manage.

How open rate is tracked

Email platforms add a 1×1 image to each message with a unique address. When the recipient’s mail app requests that image, the platform records an open for that person. If images are blocked, no open is recorded even when someone reads the email.

Apple changed the picture in iOS 15. With Protect Mail Activity turned on, Apple Mail hides the reader’s IP address and downloads remote content privately in the background when the message is received, rather than when it’s viewed. Security scanners at some companies do something similar when they check links and images.

An open rate example

Example (illustrative): you send 1,000 emails, 960 are delivered and 480 are recorded as opened, an open rate of 50%. If a large share of the list reads mail in Apple Mail, many of those 480 opens may be automatic. Ten replies tell you more about the message than the 480 opens do.

Common open rate mistakes

• Using opens as a warm signal. A recorded open isn’t proof anyone read the email. Sequencing people because they “opened three times” sends cold email with a strange first line.
• A/B testing subject lines on opens. If opens are inflated unevenly, the winning subject line may just have gone to more Apple users. Test on replies.
• Reading a drop as a spam problem. Opens move for many reasons. Check bounces, spam complaints and your sender tools before rewriting copy.
• Comparing to marketing benchmarks. Even Mailchimp’s own benchmark pages give different averages, and newsletter numbers don’t describe cold sales email.
• Tracking everything by default. Some teams turn open tracking off for cold sends, since the tracking image adds little signal.

How open rate shows up in a revenue system

Our sales pods report on numbers a partner can act on, agreed in writing before day one: meetings held, show rate and qualified pipeline, not opens. For Payoneer, a pod opened one region for one product line under Payoneer’s brand and booked 111 meetings in 3 months. Read the Payoneer story or see how our sales pods work.

Terms that sit next to open rate

Whether a message reaches the inbox at all is email deliverability, and the number that shows a person engaged is reply rate. Open rate gets quoted most for cold email and drip campaigns, and it’s a weak basis for A/B testing. Each step in a sequence should be judged on replies instead.