Email opened numbers

I believe that every email client might have a different ‘’definition’’ for email opened and especially depending on how the user set it up. For example, in Outlook, you can consider you email as read if you just passed over the email and saw the preview in the reading pane. In this case, you can’t really know if the potential respondent really read it or not.

That being said, multiple items can help to increase your response rate: 

• Sender’s email and name easy to identify for respondent
• Email’s subject that highlights the goal of the email
• clear instructions in the email about survey’s goal and length
• Instructions to reach out if needed (it helps the respondent to believe it’s not fraud).
• probably other ideas that will come up from the community as well !

Low open email rate could also be due to scenarios where emails were sent to conduct some test and recipients ignoring the emails/treating as spam/mailbox rules.

Other than what AlexandreLeduc have mentioned above, some factors that may affect the open email rate:

• include rewards on survey completion.
• using other forms of distribution like SMS, QR code or anonymous link on website.

Email open rate is monitored via tracking pixels. If you open an invitation in source mode, you should see something similar to this at the end of your code:

<img width="1" height="1" alt="" src="https://******.qualtrics.com/subscription/watermark.gif?UID=UR_******&amp;EMD=EMD_******&amp;CGC=CGC_******&amp;SV=SV_******">

Organization settings on the respondents’ side could be blocking this and preventing you from having accurate measures.

Maybe comparing your email opened rate to your survey started rate could give you an indication about what’s going on.