When you review your email marketing stats have you noticed that iPhone users typically show higher email open rates than Android phones? Given that Android phones have 3X more market share in the US and globally how does this make sense?

One key reason is that iPhones have their images turned on as a default while Android phones have images turned off by default. Email marketing vendors track opens by using a hidden pixel placed in an HTML email. Once the images are downloaded for the email, an open is registered and reported. This clearly skews the opens data as for an email where the images were not downloaded or if the email was a text version.

If you compare iPhone and Android click-through rates (ie., after the email has been opened) the data is more consistent, as click-throughs are registered the same way in either format, in both operating systems.

Screen Shot from OpenMoves OM3 Platform:

So keep this in mind as you review your stats and take this into consideration before you jump to the wrong conclusions.

This is a good reminder to design your emails with a good text to image ratio and make sure you have a readable and succinct text version of the email for those readers that do not download images. If you need some help understanding your statistics or need help with your new campaign give us a holler.