Discrepancy in email campaign results

[Anonymous]

When I pull the results of an email campaign, I have noticed that the names of people who clicked the link in the email, aren't showing up as opening the email. Why is that the case? I would assume if they clicked the link, they must have opened the email...

[Lauren_Galietti]

Kelly, I see this happen sometimes as well. I believe it's because of the way certain email programs work. For example, in some cases, a person may just view an email in a preview pane and not actually open it. They can still click that email but the open might not register.

There is actually a better explanation that mine in this discussion thread: http://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PcE0AAK

[Dan_Stevens_]

If they're viewing it in the preview pane, that will trigger an "open".  The only time this won't register an "open" is if they are reading it in plain-text mode or they have images turned off.  So what's happening here is the user has viewed/opened the email in one of these two instances and has clicked on the tracking link in the email that registeres the "click".

[Anonymous]

Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 have images "off" by default for HTML emails unless the sender is a trusted address (white-listed) or the user has otherwise specified that it is OK to display images from that particular sender. Marketo knows an email has been "opened" via small embeded image. Whether or not a recipient views the message in the preview pane or in full view, if the images are disabled Marketo cannot see that a message was opened. However, that recipient may still click a link, hence you would not see an "open" from that recipient, but you would see a "click" and web activity.

This is why I put much more emphasis on click and conversion results of A/B testing than I do sheer open rate.

Example: I just received the message below from Shutterstock. The images do not display by default, but I clicked through. They will read a click with no open activity for me for this message. This message also demonstrates why emails consisting entirely of images is a bad idea.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for your responses. This is very helpful!

[Anonymous]

Hello from 2015 everyone:)

We have an email that was made as plain text with no images at all, and a couple of links. The email was sent to 5000 leads, which resulted in 1100 opens and 55 clicks according to Marketo. How could 1100 opens be logged if there were no images to download? That is sort of contradicting the entire concept described above...

[Dan_Stevens_]

Are you using this approach to send only the text version of the email?

Create a Text Only Email - Marketo Docs - Product Docs