Email marketing has the power to help you sell products and services but you can't get any results if your emails aren't read, and your emails can't be read if they aren't opened. Ergo, your open rate is incredibly important. It's the first step in the journey to email marketing success. If people don't even open your emails, you?ll never accomplish your goal, whether that goal is to stimulate a conversation, to educate, to create brand awareness, to sell, to invite or to complain.

You'll never get 100% of recipients to open emails. Everyone's time is too short and inbox too full, so rarely concern yourself with the actual open rate itself. However, get worried or elated if your open rate changes from campaign to campaign. An increasing open rate tells you, you're hitting the mark, a decreasing open rate points to a problem.

What is an open rate and how is it calculated? An open rate is intended to show the number (percentage) of people who actually opened your email and looked at it. We'd all like to think that if someone opens our email it means they actually read it, but we can't make that leap of faith.

Open rate may be calculated differently, depending on the system doing the math. It could be the number of emails opened divided by the number of emails sent, or it could be the number of emails opened divided by the number of emails received. These formulas will give different results. Some systems count the number of times an email was opened (some people may open the same email a number of times), others count the number of people who opened an email, regardless of how many times someone opens it. These calculations would also produce very different results. The important thing is to use the same calculation consistently and watch how the open rate changes over time.

Gauging the number of opens your email receives is achieved by embedding an image into your HTML message. The image isn't actually distributed in the message, but is rather referenced from within the message, as with all HTML documents. Each time someone opens that email, he loads up the HTML document and renders it in his email client.

As the email is rendered, the recipient's email program must request a copy of that image from your server and attempt to load it in the message. Count the number of times that image is requested and there's an open rate.

If you send a message to 10,000 recipients and log 5,000 requests for your embedded image, you can safely say you've got an (approximate) open rate of 50 percent. Strictly speaking, the open rate isn't the actual number of people who opened the email but the number who requested the embedded image.

Here's a rundown of what to consider: