Outlook Preview Pane - Counts as Open?

[Ayan_Talukder]

Not entirely a Marketo question, but was curious how Marketo reads emails that are "read" when viewed in the Preview Pane in Outlook.

Does an "Open" count when an someone has an email marked as read / viewed in the Preview Pane? Couldn't find an answer online that verified this, so I wanted to see how Marketo handles this.

I assume links clicked from the Preview Pane get counted, but does that skew the Click to Open % if the Preview Pane does not count? I read somewhere inputting a 1 x 1 tracking pixel / web  beacon inserted into an email can help verify the true open number. Any validity to this?

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous]

Preview pane is not counted as an open

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Are you referring to the "reading pane"?

If so, this absolutely will count as an open if the email is rendered in the reading pane. There is no correlation to Outlook's "mark read after x seconds" feature. All that matters is whether the email itself was ever rendered.

[Kristina_Campo2]

Hi, Justin -

I'm getting lots of questions about this lately. Folks are dismissing our open rates because many people use the reading page to "scan" emails.

Just to I'm clear - will emails rendered in the reading pane ALWAYS trigger an open? Or is it only emails that download images? At our firm, lots of people have images set to not download automatically.We use Outlook 2010 .

Thank you.

k

[Dan_Stevens_]

For the email to trigger an "open" in the Outlook preview pane, images must be turned on.  Now if someone clicks a trackable link in an email (where images are turned off), that too will trigger an "open".  Which is the behavior for all plain-text mails.  The reasoning is, if someone clicks a link in an email, they also opened it.  Now of course this too is unreliable given the number of link scanners we're seeing on our emails.  These have become very problematic for some time now and add to the difficulty in providing accurate email results.

[Anonymous]

Hi Dan,

The link scanners you are talking about is this what is skewing the "clicks" vs. "people" in the email link performance report. I am getting reports that say link "X" was clicked 220 times by 25 unique people, this cant be right.

[SanfordWhiteman]

The link scanners you are talking about is this what is skewing the "clicks" vs. "people" in the email link performance report.

Yes, that's what Dan means.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Ok, a few things here:

First, Kristina Campos​ Dan is correct that an open will be show in our email reporting if the email is viewed in the reading pane of outlook in rich HTML (meaning images are shown). The open will not be shown in reporting if images are off and the user clicks no links.

Second, while Dan's right that an open will be shown for an email in our reports if any link in the email is clicked, it will not trigger an open activity to be created on the lead record. That is a very important distinction, as Smart Lists on "Opened Email" will not work for those people. We just have business logic in our reporting to handle situations like this...

Finally, Casey Dingman That is absolutely possible in the real world through a combination of two things. The human user may have actually clicked on the same link a few times (we definitely see that happen frequently, even in our Marketo marketing emails that go out) and, more importantly, the recipient may have forwarded the email to 25 colleagues who, in turn, clicked the link. In that case, Marketo cannot differentiate that it was a different person and tons of clicks will show for one lead in the database.

Hope some of this info is helpful!

Justin 

[Lynn_Ray_Pardo]

OMG!! I can't believe that a click doesn't register an open for a Lead record in Smart Lists!

But thank you for this reality check!

[Dan_Stevens_]

Yes, this can definitely be contributing to this.  But the other thing to keep in mind - and why the numbers look skewed - is that the "email link performance report" includes ALL clicks - not unique ones (such as the numbers that you see in an "email performance report").