In order to be able to gauge the success rate of your targeted email campaigns, you’re going to need to know how a few things work—not that there will be a pop quiz on all this later. You just might have to rely on your knowledge and insight to figure some things out, that’s all. Things like why your recipients aren’t opening your email, or why they are failing to click through to a desired link inside your email messages. Before you can do that, you have to know how these metrics are obtained.

Click Through Rate
One of the best methods to track whether or not your emails are being opened is by measuring the click-through rate (CTR). This is an email marketing statistic that you arrive at by tracking the number of times a specific URL—such as a particular page on your company website—is accessed. However, not everyone who receives an email opens it, and not everyone who opens an email clicks through to the desired link. So how do you determine how many people are opening your email?

Email Open Rate
One simple way of determining your email open rate is by determining your CTR—naturally, if you received 100 URL hits it means your email message was opened 100 times. But more specific email tracker analytics can tell you precisely how many times your email was opened, which can be compared to how many click-throughs were received. This is accomplished by embedding the email message with an HTML image. The number of hits that HTML image receives will provide you with the number of times the email was opened.