What factors can affect my open rate?

Esther Pomeleo-Fowler

The open statistic for an e-mail campaign is affected by a couple of factors.

First, the Convio platform knows that a message has been opened when a small blank image that has been embedded in the e-mail is downloaded. Because of this only HTML e-mails that can have an image embedded in them are counted in the number of opened messages. If a constituent is only receiving text emails, whether or not they open the email will usually not be recorded by Convio.

Secondly, many e-mail clients such as Outlook, Gmail, and Hotmail are blocking images in e-mail by default. If the constituent opens the e-mail but does not specify to download the embedded images the message will not get counted as opened.

Thirdly, if the constituent downloads their e-mail then disconnects from the Internet the image can not be found on the Internet and will not be counted as opened.

Finally, if the end user does receive the email in text format or blocks images and then uses one of the links in the email to take an action, they will be marked as having opened their email despite not having any images to download.

When the calculation for a percentage of e-mail that were opened is done there are some e-mails that are discounted from the calculation. Plain text e-mails and messages that either soft or hard bounce are not counted in the percentage.

The calculation ends up looking something like (Number of opened messages) divided by the (Number of HTML messages that did not Bounce). This ratio is then displayed as a percentage.