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Why are my email open stats wrong?
Why are my email open stats wrong?

Find out why your cold outreach sequence's email open stats are wrong

Sushant Shekhar avatar
Written by Sushant Shekhar
Updated over a week ago

Hi there! 👋

Email tracking is the best way to find out about email opens, clicks, and so on. It will help you buckle up for future sequences and perform better. 🙌

So, first, let us see how tracking is done.

How are email opens tracked?

For tracking your emails ✉️, a small 1x1 pixel image is added to the body of your email, called a tracking pixel.

When the pixel is loaded, our open tracking assumes your recipient has opened the email ✉️.

🔴 This would mean even if you opened the email, the tracking pixel will load and an open will be counted.

However, it’s easy for email tracking tools to report back inaccurate data. 📈

Let’s see why that happens, 🔎

False Positives (False Opens)

In this case, SalesBlink tracks an open even if the lead might hot have opened the email.

1️⃣ If your tracking pixel is rendered as part of email ✉️ preview. In this case, the lead may not open your email, but the image will load in the preview.

Email tracking will consider the email opened, leading to a false positives of false opens.

2️⃣ If the recipient’s email client uses bots to scan 🔎 their email content for malicious or spam content, it is likely that the bots will go through your email ✉️ multiple times.

⚡️This will trigger the tracking pixels and will show multiple false positives or false opens.

False Negatives

In this case, SalesBlink is unable to track if your lead opened your emails.

1️⃣ If the lead you sent the email ✉️ to, forwards your email to ‘n’ number of people. Those ‘n’ new opens will not be tracked.

Instead, it will seem like the original lead opened the email ‘n’ a number of times, which can be misleading.

2️⃣ If your lead is using tracking blocker plugins, the tracking pixels will automatically be blocked.

There will be no chance of knowing if the lead opened the email ✉️, leading to a false negatives.

3️⃣ Sometimes, due to default settings, the image auto-load is turned off if the email sender is not a part of the lead's email contact list.

And to track opens, images must auto-load in a user’s email client.

⚡️Therefore, the email open is not tracked in many cases because the image didn’t auto-load due to the lead's account settings.

💡So, while you can always track the emails you send, there is no surety of getting the most accurate data about opens. You can use the data as a reference but not abide by it blindly.

That's why, always focus on replies ↩️ as a real metric.

Summary

Hope you found this help doc useful! 😃

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