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Knowledge Base Home aero-right Reports aero-right Why do preview and reading panes cause an email address to appear many times on an open report?

Why do preview and reading panes cause an email address to appear many times on an open report?

Reports Updated on August 7, 2018
Here are a few reasons why you may be seeing one contact listed many times in your open report:
  • When the preview pane is used to view an email, the email is automatically "opened." Therefore, when a contact uses the preview pane to view your email, it could register as an "open" many times within only a minute or two depending on how many times the user viewed it in the preview pane.
  • Some users scroll over their emails in order to do a quick preview of the contents, helping them decide which emails to actually open.
If a user does not have a preview pane available to them, they are required to fully open an email to see the contents. This decreases the likelihood of a contact appearing to have opened an email multiple times within a few minutes.

I know the recipient opened my email but it wasn’t recorded. Why?

Not all emails viewed in the preview pane will register as an open. This is because there are only a few ways Benchmark Email can track your campaign as an open and it requires the subscriber to take some sort of action in their email accounts.

A subscriber must do at least one of the following for an email to be reported as an open:

  • Allow images to be displayed in the email. This means that text-only emails cannot be tracked as opened.
  • Click on any link in the HTML version of the email. Even if they do not enable images to be viewed, it will track as an open if they click on a link.
  • Clicked on "Having trouble viewing this email" in either HMTL version or plain-text version.
When a contact takes at least one of those steps above when reading an email through a preview pane, the email will register as an open every time thereafter when it is previewed. Emails are not able to be tracked as an open if a contact does not do one or more of the above steps.