How Email Open Rates and Click Rates Are Calculated

Open rate and click rate are two key ways to measure how people engage with your emails. Each tells you something different, and each has its limits. Open rates, especially, aren’t always accurate.

In this article, we’ll break down how email tracking works and how both open and click rates are calculated.

Open rates

How we track opens

We track opens in HTML emails using a tiny invisible image called a tracking pixel.

When someone opens your email, that image loads from our server, and that’s how we know it was opened.

Accuracy of open rates

Open rates aren’t always accurate, and here’s why:

Sometimes they’re too high:

• Privacy tools like Apple Mail Privacy Protection can trigger false opens.

• Some email clients or devices "preload" images, which can also inflate the numbers.

Sometimes they’re too low:

• Opens are only tracked if images are displayed. If the subscriber’s email client blocks images or they choose not to load them, the open won’t be recorded.

• Some people read the email without ever downloading images, so it looks like they didn’t open it (even if they did).

The exception?
If someone clicks a link in your email (excluding the unsubscribe link), we count that as an open, even if images weren’t loaded.

How we calculate open rates

To determine the open rate for an email campaign, the number of unique opens is divided by the number of emails sent, minus those that bounced.

Monitor your open rates

While open rates aren’t 100% accurate, they’re a solid way to track engagement over time. If you notice your open rates dropping, it might be time to rethink your email strategy, whether it’s your sending frequency or the content you’re sharing.

Common reasons for low or dropping open rates include:

• Sending too many (or too few) emails

• Subject lines that don’t grab attention

• Sending the same content to everyone instead of targeting specific segments

How to track your open rates:

• Check your campaign reports after each send

• Use our built-in analytics tool

• Compare different campaign reports to spot trends

Click rates

How we track clicks

When you add links to your email, they’re first saved to go through our servers. When someone clicks a link, we track the click then quickly redirect them to the correct webpage.

How we calculate clicks

To determine the click rate for an email campaign, the number of recipients who clicked is divided by the number of emails delivered (which is those sent minus those that bounced).

Click rate vs click-to-open rate (CTOR)

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is another way to measure engagement.

It shows how many people clicked after opening your email, calculated by dividing clicks by unique opens. But since open rates aren’t always reliable, we prefer to use click rate instead.

Click rate measures how many people clicked out of everyone who actually received the email, which gives you a clearer picture.

If you have any questions regarding opens and clicks please contact our team on support@touchbasepro.com