Open rate for an email

How an email's open rate is calculated and where to find the Opened report

Review your plan: Full access to this report is not available in all Constant Contact plans. If you don’t have full access, you may need to upgrade your plan.

Your email opens are the first step in gauging your email engagement. You can compare the open rate for each email against each other to see which email performed better, and you can look deeper to see exactly which contacts are opening too. When you understand your opens, you can make more informed decisions about the type of content you're sending.

• Calculating the open rate for your emails
• Viewing the Opens report for your emails

Did you know? After you send an email, your opens information can be found in a couple of different places to give you some insight into how your email performed. The Email Details page shows you the opens for a specific email, and opens for all of your email campaigns, and other reports, like the clicks report, are found on the Reporting tab.

Calculating the open rate for your emails

An email's open rate is the percentage of contacts who opened your email compared to how many contacts were sent the email. The percentage of opens is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent, excluding the number of bounces. Each contact who opens the email is only counted once, even if that person opens it multiple times.

Open rate = [ Unique opens / (Sends - Bounces) ] x 100

Example:

You send an email to 5 contacts, 1 email bounces, and 2 contacts open the email. The open rate is calculated like this: Open rate = [ 2 unique opens / (5 emails sent - 1 bounced email) ] = 1/2, or 50%

Did you know? Unique opens exclude any proxy opens that may have occurred through email security programs, and some opens can't be tracked at all. Learn more about factors that may affect your open rate.

Viewing the Opens report for your emails

1. From the menu on the left-hand side, click Reporting.
2. Click the Emails tab.
   
   
   
   
3. Scroll down to the Email campaigns table and view the Opens column next to the email. For each email, the number on top is the total unique opens, and the percentage below is the open rate. From here you can compare the open rate for multiple email campaigns, and export your reporting.

• The number on top is the total unique opens for your email, and the percentage below is the open rate for the email.
• Clicking on either number brings you to the "Unique Opens" report where you can compare the unique opens to all opens for the email, and compare your email's open rate to the average for your industry.
  
  
  
  

Design tip: If you don't feel like your open rates stack up to the industry average, try these tips to help improve your email open rates.

Questions?