We have an admission to make. There are stakeholders on our email list that have never opened one of our messages. They haven’t unsubscribed, they’ve just never opened an email. Not one. And yet, at times, we’ll include them on messaging we think might interest them.

What if we could judge the effectiveness of the email only on those who have already engaged with us previously?

The idea behind “Effective Open Rate” is just that. While we know you may email your whole stakeholder database from time to time, there is a chunk of stakeholders (all clients have them!) who have never opened an email from you. We call this group “Never Opened.”  The problem is, for most clients, they judge their open rate based on the total recipient count – which includes those Never Opened folks.

In this case, the Effective Open Rate breaks that stat out, letting you know the total number of recipients for each email who have never opened a message you’ve sent. We then show you an adjusted Effective Open Rate that shows you what we think is a better judge of how well your messaging is doing.

Here’s the simple calculation:

[Unique Opens / (Total Recipient Count – Never Opened)] x 100 = Effective Open Rate (%)

See also: Drafting an email and Reports Dashboard.