: How do I know my email open rate? I saw some people saying their newsletter has X open-rate. How can I know this thing?

@Turnbaugh106

Probably the easiest way is MailChimp.


Nice UI/UX
Pretty good stats for open rate, Clicks, unsibscribe etc
You can also link it up to google.
And it is FREE


Have been using it for the last 6 months. Only complaint is that the template editor is a bit tricky at the start.

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@Kevin317

Are you using Google Analytics? Then you can use support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033863 custom campaigns. Here you have an support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867 URL Builder.

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@Looi9037786

This depends on how you distribute your newsletters, are you using client software or an online service provided by your hosting provider like phplist, or a service such as mailchimp which offer stats like open rates as standard.

the image tracker solution already mentioned is a preferred solution of mine.

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@Berumen354

The technique used to work out if an email has been opened or not is to put a tracker image with a unique identifier in the request URL so your server can log that the email has been at least viewed. This image is normally just a 1x1px square that is invisible to the end user. The src of the image will be something like tracker.php?user_id=1312, then on your server, tracker.php takes that user_id string and can mark that user as opening that email.

However, any figure you gain from from technique can't be taken expclicitly, there are a number of factors that can lead to both an over-estimate and under-underestimate:


Most email clients ask you to download images purely for this reason
Users may open the email but not read it
Users may not receive the HTML version
Images may be pre-fetched by virus scanners and scanned

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