Are open rates declining?

A glance at open rates would give the impression that users are opening a lot less e-mails than they did one year ago. But DoubleClick, in their recent E-mail Trend Report, believes that the reason for the decline is less about a change in the number of clicks than the effect of image blocking technology used by many e-mail programs. Since DoubleClick measures open rates by tracking image calls in HTML-formatted e-mails, image blocking obviously affects this metric.

However, the lowered rates may in fact be more representative of the truth, according to DoubleClick. Before image blocking, many e-mails may have registered as "opened" when they had merely shown up in an e-mail preview window as a user scrolled through e-mails or clicked on them before deleting. The relative stability of click and conversion rates supports this view.