We're running an email campaign of product updates to a highly engaged list of 'key contacts'. We were surprised to see our open rate was only 40%.
Reading more, I understand open rate tracking relies on single pixel images embedded in the message to be downloaded, so email clients like MS Outlook (that don't automatically download images) could skew the open rate data.
About 44% of our opens so far were in Outlook.
Am I correct that Outlook creates an undercount? Has anyone used any metric to compensate for this?
Hi @Hedge, does your marketing campaign include images in the email? Outlook can be set such that it will not automatically download images included in emails, however if the recipients opened the email and wanted to view any images included in the content, they would need to opt to download these images. In that case an open would be triggered once the images download.
Hi @Hedge, does your marketing campaign include images in the email? Outlook can be set such that it will not automatically download images included in emails, however if the recipients opened the email and wanted to view any images included in the content, they would need to opt to download these images. In that case an open would be triggered once the images download.
So for the purposes of tracking email opens, if Outlook is set to 'not download images by default', emails could be read in the preview panel of Outlook but not considered 'opened' by Hubspot, as the pixel didn't download.
Additionally, in Outlook, the preview pane can also skew opens higher than what they really are.
For example, if someone uses preview pane (and has images turned on) and navigates up and down their message list a lot, they can surf over your email a bunch of times and it looks like they opened it 30 or more times, when really they're just navigating around.
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