Render Rate

Render Rate or Renders is a relatively new industry-wide term used to describe a metric created to measure the initial level of email engagement more consistently and more accurately than a simple open rate. At the onset of defining this metric a few subsets were also defined: 1. Unique Render Rate; and 2. Total Render Rate; and total renders that include clicks even if the HTML, or even a plain text email, doesn’t render completely.

Although moving forward and away from the simple open rate as a metric for determining email campaign success or failure, the inconsistencies with the previous metrics was the catalyst to move beyond “open” and consider “render” as a more accurate way to measure viability or the lack thereof.

In a nutshell, render rate more accurately reflects the way email users currently view and interact with email: affected by image blocking, wide adoption of preview panes, and the explosive growth of email being read on HTML and image-unfriendly mobile devices. And the most striking difference between open and render rates are that all the open rate tells us is that the tracking image was displayed.

Basically, if implemented correctly, the render rate helps email marketers learn more about their subscribers and how they read and view emails, whether on a laptop/desk top or mobile device, and in turn drives almost every aspect of the email newsletter’s creation and delivery methods.