How does e-shot measure email opens and displays? 

On the face of it, one would assume that the open rate, or display rate in e-shot terminology, is the number of people who open/display your email. Sounds logical, right? 

Unfortunately, that's not necessarily the case. An email is only counted as opened when one of the following occurs: 

1. The reader enables images in your email to be displayed in the preview pane or in a full view of the email. 

2. The recipient clicks a link in the email. 

This is because the mechanism used to track the open is a tiny image pixel located within the email design.  

This can be notoriously unreliable however and not all email recipient agents handle images in the same way. For example, when using Outlook, images are initially off by default, so unless the recipient activates the image this will not record as an open. So it is possible that you could have a really engaged recipient, who not only read all of the mail, was engaged enough to move to their browser and visit your site, but by not downloading images or clicking in a link in the message itself – this would never be registered as an open. 

Furthermore, email open tracking has become increasingly complex because of developments in cyber security and the new iOS 15 Privacy Protection. So as a result of the prevalence of Apple Mail, it will likely make open tracking and analytics based on them even more inaccurate.  

There have also been reports that emails Apple identify as Junk will not automatically download images. This will need to be verified in more detail in due course, but could still offer ways to identify disengaged contacts using Apple devices.