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Open rate

Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open, calculated by dividing unique opens by the number of emails delivered and multiplying by 100.

Built and maintained by , founder of Liftli · last reviewed July 2026

Open rate has long been the first number people check on an email campaign. Divide unique opens by delivered emails, multiply by 100, and you get the share of your audience that at least opened the message. It is driven mostly by the sender name and subject line, since those are the only things a recipient sees before deciding, which makes it a decent read on whether people trust you enough to look.

There is a real problem underneath it. Open tracking works by loading a tiny invisible image, and privacy features like Apple Mail Privacy Protection now load that image automatically whether or not a human opened anything. So reported open rates are inflated and inconsistent, and a jump in opens can be a privacy setting rather than genuine interest. Treat the number as directional, not precise.

Because of that, many senders have shifted their attention to clicks and replies, which require an actual action and are much harder to fake. Open rate still has value for spotting deliverability problems, a sudden drop often means you are landing in spam, but it is a weaker measure of engagement than it used to be. Watch the trend, and lean on downstream metrics for the truth.

Frequently asked questions

How is email open rate calculated?
Divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails successfully delivered, then multiply by 100. Delivered means the email reached an inbox, so bounces are excluded from the denominator. The catch is how opens are counted: most tools register an open when a tracking pixel loads, which privacy features can trigger automatically. That makes the raw number less reliable than the simple formula suggests.

Why are open rates unreliable now?
Because open tracking depends on a hidden image loading, and privacy tools like Apple Mail Privacy Protection load that image automatically for every message, whether or not a person actually opened it. The result is inflated and inconsistent open rates that can move for reasons that have nothing to do with reader interest. Use open rate as a rough directional signal and rely on clicks and replies for engagement you can trust.

What is a good email open rate?
Benchmarks vary widely by industry and list quality, and privacy-driven inflation has muddied them further, so treat any published average with caution. A more useful approach is to compare against your own recent campaigns to the same list. A sustained drop is worth investigating, since it can signal a deliverability problem or subject lines that stopped landing, regardless of what an industry benchmark claims is normal.
Put it into practice

Headline Generator — Write subject lines people actually want to open. Open the free tool →

Related terms

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