Open rates and click rates for a particular sequence can be found in the Messaging Performance section of the Sequence Report. Exceed.ai tracks email opens by embedding an invisible tracking pixel into each sent email. That image is loaded when an email is opened, allowing Exceed.ai to mark it as opened.
Link click tracking is not done automatically, but can be activated under Settings --> Project Settings --> Email click - through tracking:
It is important to recognize that email open rate is not an accurate metric and can be noticeably inflated, sometimes even falsely showing 100%. These increased open rates are caused by multiple factors:
Email scanners
Email scanning is a security measure used to protect users from viruses, malware and spam. These scanners evaluate links and attachments to identify suspicious content, blocking any malicious emails from reaching the user’s inbox. As a result, they can unintentionally affect the accuracy of email open rates, causing them to seem higher than they really are.
Mail Privacy Protection
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection program (MPP) allows Apple Mail users to hide information about when, where and how they open emails. MPP hides the user’s IP address so that senders can’t link it to other online activity or determine location, as well as preventing senders from seeing if and when the user has opened their email.
When an email is sent to an Apple Mail user, Apple caches the entire email on its own server. This process causes all images to be downloaded, including the invisible image pixel, thus automatically counting this as an open. When the user actually opens the email, it is downloaded from Apple’s own servers instead of from the sender’s web host or email service provider (ESP) server, thus hiding the real open and significantly impacting the accuracy of the overall email open rates.
Copied Recipients/Forwarded Messages
If a CC’ed or BCC’ed recipient opens the email, this will count in the open rate calculation- even if it wasn’t opened by the primary intended recipient. The same goes for forwarded emails: each forwarded view will count as an open.
Keep these factors in mind when addressing open and click rates, and consider these best practices:
Focus on engagement metrics – Metrics like Response Rate and Conversion Rate are more reliable and actionable indicators of success and will therefore help make better informed decisions about your email marketing strategy.
Segment your contact list – Use our Audiences feature to easily define which predetermined criteria to segment contacts by. This will help identify patterns among specific subsets of recipients that don’t necessarily rely on open data.
Monitor trends over time – Rely on open rates only to determine general insights at scale, without expecting exact accuracy of whether a contact indeed opened a message at a specific point in time.