Less of our customers are reading their emails; are there settings that may be causing this?

Environment:

Outreach - Broadcast Mailings

Resolution:

Less readers viewing their emails:
To answer this question, let us first start out by telling how email 'open' tracking is accomplished.

In your HTML mailings that are sent out, a single 1x1 pixel is attached to the sent mailing.  When the end user opens this email, then the Oracle B2C Service server is reached and that single pixel graphic is requested.  Now we know that our end user has opened the email, as the graphic has been accessed.

This tracking can be hampered by customers that choose to not load pictures when opening an email, or by email applications that block graphics contained within emails.

In your Text mailings, there is no way to add this pixel, and so the 'open' is only tracked if a customer follows a specific link in the mailing.  Here, we are assuming that since our client has followed the link, they must have opened the email.

Oracle B2C Service does not have the ability to track an email after it has been handed off to the recipient's server; except for when the pixel is loaded, or a link is clicked.  This means that if your readers are not loading the HTML graphics, then the Email will be delivered but not opened.  If a customer receives the Text mailing, opens the mailing, but does not follow any of the provided links, then there is no way to track whether or not they have read the mailing and so it will also show up as having been delivered but not opened.