Open Rates are Open to Interpretation
I highly recommend you click over to Tamara’s recent post on open rates at BeRelevant, an email marketing blog, for a quick and easy explanation of how open rates are calculated.
I frequently speak with marketers who aren’t aware that open rates are based on images being loaded or that they can’t be tracked at all for text-only emails. These facts make open rates a highly unreliable marker of success - and it’s likely that if you’re presenting these numbers to your boss, you’re actually selling yourself way short!