How To Track Email Open Rates Using Common Tools

How Does Email Open Rate Tracking Work?

Email open rate tracking provides marketers with insights into recipients’ behavior. It’s based on tracking pixels, 1x1 images embedded in emails that provide key analytics, such as open rates.

So let’s talk about open rate — the percentage of people who open your marketing emails. A higher rate means more people are opening — and therefore are interested — in what you're sending them. Tracking this can help marketers refine their strategies and improve the email experience by delivering relevant, engaging content.

Here’s how to calculate the open rate:

For instance, an online cosmetics store sends an email to 1,000 subscribers. If 100 emails bounced and 500 people opened them, the open rate would be 55.6%.

By industry standards, that looks like a good open rate! (But as we’ll cover later, it’s not enough to look at industry benchmarks.)

Heads up: The open rate formula uses unique opens. That means if someone opens an email more than once, the unique open only counts it once.

Here’s the Thing About Tracking Pixels

It’s got limitations. And sometimes, even when an email’s opened, a tracking pixel’s not able to pick it up.

• Images get blocked: Some email clients block images by default, preventing tracking pixels from loading. This leads to missed opens, even if the email’s read.
• Apple Mail preloads images via proxy servers: An Apple Mail user can enable a feature that preloads and caches images. This routes messages through a proxy server and marks them as "opened" — even if the recipient never opens them. This could inflate open rates and skew data.
• Emails in spam folders often open as plain text: Spam filters block external content, including tracking pixels. So if a recipient opens your message from a spam folder, it goes untracked — unless images are manually enabled.

How to Track Email Open Rates for Campaigns?

Here are a few simple ways you can easily track email marketing campaigns using open rates.

Using Email Service Providers (ESPs)

If you’re using modern email tracking software, the tracking pixel is inserted automatically. The good news is, you don't need to code anything. These ESPs typically handle the heavy lifting — when someone opens your email, the email client requests this tracking pixel from the ESP’s server, which then logs the “open” automatically.

But there can also be limitations.

For instance, if the image doesn't load (as described above), the open never happened — according to the data. Or if the image loads automatically without a human present, the open happened — even if nobody read it.

It can be truly tricky to know if someone’s actually read your email.

Open-Rate Data in Marketing Dashboards

Marketers can view open-rate data in their ESP’s analytics dashboard, typically under the email marketing performance section. This dashboard provides a summary of how many recipients opened the email and other email campaign metrics.

A Common Misconception in Email Tracking: Google Analytics (GA)

Some might think GA tracks email opens. It does not.

Google Analytics lives on your website, not inside your subscribers' inboxes. GA has no visibility into what happens inside the Gmail app or Outlook. It’s blind until the user leaves the inbox and lands on your site.

And while GA can’t track opens, it’s significantly more reliable at tracking intent. By using UTM parameters (special tags added to the end of your links), GA can tell you:

• Which specific email campaign drove the traffic.
• Which link within the email was clicked.
• What the user did after they arrived (e.g., Did they buy or did they bounce?).

Looking Into Other Metrics and Benchmarks

In addition to open rates, dashboards often display metrics like click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and spam complaints. These email marketing metrics help provide a broader picture of campaign performance beyond just opens.

There are benchmarks for each of these metrics. For instance, email marketing open rates have certain industry benchmarks where one industry tends to be higher than the other.

But a word of warning here. Comparing your open rates to industry benchmarks for email marketing is like playing with fire because you don't know the composition of the "industry's" audience.

Here are a couple of examples:

• Whether your competitor’s audience use mostly Android or iPhones, for instance, could affect the open rate. And your audience could have a totally different profile.
• Whether majority of your competitors’ audiences use Gmail or Outlook more than you. Just so you know, Gmail and Outlook significantly influence open rate accuracy due to their handling of images and tracking pixels. Their unique behaviors can either inflate or suppress open rates, making it crucial to understand their impact.

Limitations of Tracking Email Open Rates in Gmail

• Here’s what many marketers think when you track Gmail opens: Gmail uses image proxying and caching, which can preload images and inflate open rates.
• This can suppress open rates if cached images aren’t reloaded for subsequent views.
• However, we haven’t found any official source from Gmail about the accuracy of this.

Limitations of Tracking Email Open Rates in Outlook

• Outlook blocks images by default, especially in desktop and web versions. (However, users can unblock this for trusted sources from their settings.) That said, This could lead to underreported opens.
• Differences between desktop and web vs mobile version could mean that Outlook-heavy audiences typically show lower overall open rates.

All these said, the only benchmark that matters is your own historical data.

Is Email Open Rate Tracking Still Reliable?

No. Apple Mail Privacy Protection and machine-generated opens from bots and proxies have made open rates highly unreliable.

Instead of treating them as definitive metrics, use open rates as directional signals to identify trends, not absolute email engagement. If your open rate usually hovers around 25% (flaws and all) and suddenly drops to 10% on a specific campaign, you likely have a deliverability issue or a terrible subject line.

The exact number doesn't matter; the deviation from the norm — and whether it goes significantly up or down — does.

How Can I Improve the Usefulness of Open-Rate Data?

Open rate data has its limitations. But you can still use it while you clean up your digital strategy and shift your focus.

Improve Inbox Placement So Pixels Can Load

Improve deliverability by using authenticated domains, engaging subject lines, and providing relevant, human-first content (read: spammy). Ensuring your messages land in the inbox also means tracking pixels have a chance to load.

Reduce Bounce Rates by Verifying Emails

High bounce rates hurt your sender reputation and email deliverability. Regularly cleaning your email lists to remove invalid addresses can reduce bounces.

One way to clean your email lists? Eliminating outdated or inactive email addresses. This can improve engagement rates and data accuracy. Use services like VerifiedEmail to validate your lists and maintain a healthy database.

Check if your email is valid with VerifiedEmail

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Avoid Spam Traps; Keep Your List Clean

Spam traps are email addresses designed to catch spammers and can damage your sender reputation. Avoid purchasing lists and focus on organic list-building to steer clear of these traps.

It’s solid email marketing practice to verify your email lists and regularly ensure all addresses are valid and active. Tools like VerifiedEmail can help you not just maintain clean, reliable lists for better results but also prevent your emails from going to spam.

Key Takeaways: How to Track Email Opens Moving Forward?

Open rates can tell you a story. But it’s not the whole story. While it can be useful, it also has its limitations.

If you want data that actually tells a story you can act on, it’s a good idea to look into other metrics like clicks, replies, and conversions — signals that prove a human chose to engage.

More importantly, a clean, verified email list can steer you clear from landing in spam, which means wasted effort and misleading metrics. When you verify your emails and keep your lists free of invalid or inactive addresses, you dramatically increase the reliability of your engagement data with better inbox placement, fewer bounces, and real, trackable signals.