Builder brands: How open rates are measured

The open rates that you see within your campaign statistics can be affected by multiple things, varying from each contact. While the idea of a read email is as straightforward as a customer opening an email campaign they receive, possibly clicking a link, and it is reported as ‘opened’ in your statistics to see how many engaged customers you have, no open rate can be 100% accurate due to a few different factors on the receiver's end. A few of these factors are:

• How opened emails are tracked
• Which opened emails can’t be tracked
• Unintentionally opened emails

How opened emails are tracked

For us to track which emails are opened, we follow an industry-standard practice of embedding a transparent single-pixel image unique to each recipient and campaign that has no impact on your designs, and our server makes a call to. Each time the campaign is opened and images load, they call from our servers on what content to display. Since the single-pixel image is included with all the other images, we can track when it is displayed and use that to count the number of opens.

If you are curious about the tracking for emails that do not have images displayed in their application or browser, we follow a separate tracking method. If the server isn’t called for the pixel image to load, we automatically record any email campaigns that have a link within them, clicked as opened as well. While it is not always possible to capture every open, this ensures that we are able to track as many opens as possible.

Which opened emails can’t be tracked

Images blocked by an email provider

Since we know that when the tracking pixel can’t be displayed/loaded, we have no way to track opens. Some email hosts block images from showing or do not support images in their clients for content or data concerns, such as a phone application. If you are notified that your subscribers can’t see your images, you can always direct them to their settings for their client to show images.

Unintentionally opened emails

Sometimes you may see an increase in open rates from people who have unintentionally opened your email. This can occur when your recipient clicks the wrong email, has the email opened on multiple computers or devices, or has the email load into a preview panel on a client, such as Mac Mail. Though these emails are not active and intentionally opened, even if the tracking pixel is displayed in a preview window, it will count as being opened. To help with these situations, we track Unique Opens, where we will only count the email being opened once per recipient. If you are curious about how many times each recipient opens an email, you can also do so by selecting a contact from the Recipients tab on your campaign stats page