Open ratio
The open ratio shows the percentage of newsletters opened by your subscribers. This percentage is the number of opened newsletters in relation to the total number of accepted newsletters. A newsletter is considered opened when images in the newsletter are loaded and/or a link in your newsletter is clicked.
It is not always possible to determine whether a newsletter has been opened. Many email clients do not show images by default. Laposta can therefore not register whether your newsletter has actually been viewed.
On the other hand, images are sometimes automatically loaded and links are automatically clicked by software intended to protect recipients from, for example, bad links (phishing).
The open ratio in itself is therefore not a particularly precise measurement tool, but it certainly gives a good impression of how enthusiastically your subscribers receive your newsletter. In practice, an open ratio of 20-40% is normal. With very active target groups, we sometimes see an open ratio of over 75%.
An open ratio of 38% means that, on average, 38 out of 100 subscribers open your newsletters (i.e., load images and/or click on a link).
As mentioned, our program adds an invisible image to every newsletter. As soon as the images in the newsletter have loaded, this invisible image is also requested from our servers. This is how we know that the newsletter has been opened.
To be clear: if no images have been opened or no links have been clicked (your newsletter has not been opened), it does not mean that your newsletter has not been read!
Why are images not displayed by default in most email clients? This has to do with spam. Spammers used to use images to see if email addresses were active. To prevent this, some email clients nowadays delay the loading of images.
Currently, however, it is more common again for images to be shown immediately. For example, Gmail does this, and many mobile phones, including the iPhone, also load images immediately.
Privacy
Keeping track of the reading and clicking behaviour of your recipients is an important source of information, but it does mean an invasion of their privacy. Laposta has various settings for this. You can read more about this under 'Tracking and reporting'.