Here are a few reasons why I recommend you don’t track the open rates at all.
1. It hurts your deliverability:
Technically, open rate tracking works by inserting a transparent image to an email with query parameters in the image source URL.
When an email client opens the email, the browser will render the email and load the image.
Now, you are inserting two things in the email that will be looked upon unfavourably by the content filters.
An image and query parameters. For example, Microsoft’s Spam Evaluation Scoring guidelines specifically list both of these as something that will increase your evaluation score.
2. ESPs and email clients actively try to screw up the metric:
Many ESPs and email clients either purposefully block the tracking attempt, never loading the image and triggering the Email Open event, or trigger the event even though the recipient never opened the email or never saw it because it’s in spam folder.
This is done at the email gateway level or in the email client, most often to protect the privacy of the recipient.
So you might have 90% open rates in your tracking software but actually nobody even saw your emails because they were filtered to spam.
Open rate tracking used to work back in the day before ESPs developed counter-measures for it.
Nowadays you can’t trust the numbers at all.
So how does one measure campaign performance if one shouldn’t track open rates?
The sole purpose of the cold email is to elicit a response from your lead. Your reply rates should be the main KPI for measuring campaign performance and effectiveness.
Keep them healthy and ditch the vanity metric.