Let's replace the term "open rate"

Many people have discussed the problems inherent in the "open rate" statistic you might see in your email marketing reports. Not to get into the details again, but basically it's a highly misleading number -- it doesn't truly give you a good count on the number of messages that are open for a variety of reasons. With Outlook 2007, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and others blocking images by default, chances are good you've seen your "open rate" stat drop a lot in the past year or so.

As an industry, let's rename "open rate" to something that implies the inherent problem in the numbers. The metric really doesn't measure the number of people who opened your message -- it measures the number of people *we can track* who opened it. There are probably lots more who actually opened your email that aren't accounted for in this number.

I propose "counted open rate" as the new name for this number, because that is really what the metric tells us. It shows us the number of people *we were able to count* who opened your message.

A subtle difference? Perhaps. But I believe the word "counted" at the front of the metric may remind marketers this isn't a perfect number. It might lead senior execs who don't understand the nuts and bolts of digital marketing to ask, "What does 'counted' mean, and who are the uncounted opens?", which of course sets up the discussion about the metric's inherent flaws.