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HomeIf you’ve been sending emails for a while, you might have heard the phrase ‘proxy opens’, but haven’t much of an idea what they mean. Don’t worry - we’re here to help you make sense of it all.
In order to improve email security, major email providers will open your email content prior to delivery. They’ll check it for spammy, misleading and malicious content before delivering it to the recipient's inbox. This will count as an open when you look at your campaign tracking - but may not actually represent a real open from a customer.
There are a few reasons why proxy emails happen:
Privacy and security measures: Some email providers use proxy opens to remove the ability for senders to track their clients' engagement. This blocks IPs, and removes any tracking associated with links, such as UTM parameters.
Image Caching: To speed up loading times, some email providers might cache images before opening. When the cache is refreshed, this might even count as another open, even if the email has never been opened by a user.
Automated Systems: Some users, especially businesses, have automated security systems that will open an email in proxy and scan it for malware or spam. This can trigger an email open with zero actual human involvement.
Proxy opens can influence your open rate metric, giving you a false sense of how engaged your audience is. This can appear misleading, but when combined with other metrics, you can still paint a good picture of your audience engagement:
Work in conjunction with clicks: Click rates are a much more accurate method to track engagement. Use these as your baseline for performance, and compare as a percentage against the open rate.
Monitor over time: Keep an eye on changes to your open rate over time. You’ll likely find the same users opening in proxy every time, you can still track trends of open rate engagement. Keep an eye out for any dips in open rates, and compare this to clicks to see if there are any patterns.
Proxy opens are a natural part of modern email marketing and are here to stay. With an ever-increasing emphasis on privacy and security, you’ll need to learn to work with an increasingly difficult set of metrics.
Next time you’re reviewing your email stats, remember not to rely solely on one metric. Combine your metrics and review them alongside each other to build an accurate picture of your audience. Keep focusing on delivering quality content, and following the best practices of email!
