About Open and Click Rates

Your Mailchimp tracking reports include open and click rates, which measure your recipients' engagement with your subject lines and email content. These statistics provide key information about your email marketing, and are a great starting point to test and improve your emails.

The Apple MPP (Mail Privacy Protection) policy for email was released September 21, 2021 with the iOS 15 operating system. With this release, Apple downloads incoming emails on its own server. This makes it appear as if a recipient opened the email, which inflates the sender’s open-related metrics. You have the option to exclude emails opened by Apple MPP from your open-related metrics for emails sent on or after June 22, 2024.

How we calculate open and click rates

The open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered emails were opened by recipients. To find this out, Mailchimp loads a tiny, transparent image into each email and counts how often the image is downloaded among the delivered emails. The image is invisible to your recipients.

The click rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered emails registered at least 1 click. Your click rate reveals general trends, but isn't particularly detailed. Additional information about your subscribers, click-throughs, and timing is available on your Reports page.

Because open rate tracking relies on images, it isn't 100% accurate. If a recipient's email client has images turned off, the tracking image won't load, and their email won't register as opened. Mailchimp reduces this margin of error by factoring in click-throughs with open rates.

We recommend that you exclude Apple MPP from your reports for more accurate opens and open-related metrics. To learn more about Apple MPP and how it impacts your opens and open-related metrics, check out About Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP).

Because recipients must open an email to click a link inside it, we'll consider those clicks as opens even if the tracking image didn't load.

Why open and click rates are important

Open and click rates can give you a good idea of how your emails are performing with a particular audience. If an open rate is strong, it usually means your subject lines resonate with your audience. If your click rates are good, the message content is relevant to recipients who open the email.

Average open and click rates can vary from audience to audience, and differ by industry, company size, and other factors. Check out the Email Marketing Benchmarks report, which can give you an idea of how your rates stack up against similar users. Once you know where you stand, you can use Mailchimp tools such as A/B Tests to test and improve your email marketing.

Make time to review your reports after every email, consider what factors might have affected your results, and test.

How to improve open rates

A low open rate generally indicates one of these things.

• Your subject line is not relevant or interesting enough
• Your audience is composed of a wide variety of subscribers
• You may be sending too many or too few emails

Test your subject line

An effective subject line clearly describes what's inside your emails, but you'll want to test a few variations to find out what works best for your audience.

Draft 2 or 3 subject lines that differ slightly; for example, "Company 123 Weekly Newsletter" and "This Week's News from Company 123," and set them up in an A/B Test.

Segment your audience

Think about who your subscribed contacts are, and what kind of information is most useful to them. If sales reps, store owners, and consumers all receive the same content, some could become frustrated by irrelevant content and stop opening your emails. You can use subscriber location, interests, or activity to segment your audience, so you can send the right content to the right people. Segmentation helps you create stronger emails and build trust with your subscribed contacts.

Change your send frequency

Depending on your email marketing goals, you may send emails 10 times a day or once a quarter. If your open rate is much lower than your industry's benchmark and you're using tested subject lines and targeting your emails, consider testing how often you send. In general, sending more emails negatively impacts the level of engagement per email sent, but it's different for everyone.

How to improve click rates

Your click rate tells you how many of your recipients find your email content useful. To improve your click rate, create content that applies to a wide variety of recipients. Like open rates, you can sometimes accomplish this by targeting specific content to a smaller, segmented audience.

You can also try changing your link text and testing content blocks in your emails.

Make links more effective

We suggest that you avoid the generic phrase "click here" for your click-through text. Some people won't click it because it's unclear where the link goes. It also leaves out important information screen readers need for accessibility. Also, "click here" suggests clicking a mouse, which doesn't apply for people viewing their emails on a touchscreen.

Make your link text descriptive and concise, and point the click-through URL to the most relevant information available. If you're referencing a particular service, send the link directly to that service's webpage instead of your business homepage.

Embed more links

Some users have success with including multiple links to the same content in a single email. This is particularly helpful for emails with a single call to action, such as prompting your recipients to donate.

You could put donation buttons in a several content areas, or vary link text throughout your email. Use several links to increase the likelihood of someone clicking—even though every link points to the same webpage. It's always a good idea to test your links.

Testing content with A/B Testing Campaigns

A/B Tests can help you test a lot of things, including the content in your email. You'll create different versions of your content in a single A/B email, and Mailchimp will send each version to a separate set of subscribed contacts in your audience and track engagement. The one that performs better is sent to the remaining set of your subscribed contacts who weren't sent any of the test versions.

Open and click rates improve when you provide relevant content to the most interested group of people. Review your reports and test often to get the most out of your emails.