Can I see who opened my email?

That sentence is the whole feature. It is worth reading twice, because it is the reason your numbers will look different from the ones another email tool would show you.

What has to be true before anything is recorded

Four things, and all of them at once:

1. Recording is switched on across bernard. It is.
2. Bernard has not switched it off for your site. Every site is on by default; we switch one off only if something is wrong with it, and the card would say so.
3. Your site’s own setting is on, which it is unless somebody turned it off.
4. An owner of your account has accepted the addition to the Terms.

If any one of those is missing, nothing is recorded for anybody, and Bernard will tell you which one it is - one reason, the first that failed, so you always have exactly one thing to look at.

For almost every site the one thing left is the fourth. Accepting the addition to the Terms is genuinely up to you, and nobody can do it for you.

Getting it going

1. Your site sends campaigns from its own email address. Recording needs that sending address, so it comes first. How does email sending work, and do I need my own address? covers it. Bernard sets up the recording in the same step, with nobody at our end involved. The same goes when he links this site to an address you already have.
2. An owner of your account accepts the addition to the Terms. The card offers the link.

Then the card says recording is on and how many of your people have agreed.

The number who have agreed starts at nought. Your readers are only asked once recording is on for your site, on the page where they confirm a sign-up or on their own preferences page, so it grows from there. How do people agree to opens and clicks being recorded? explains how.

Then, on top of all four, each individual reader still needs to have agreed. A person who has not agreed is sent the plain message with its original links, and no record of them is kept. How do people agree to opens and clicks being recorded? covers how somebody agrees and how they stop.

Switching it off, and back on

Your site’s own setting starts on, so once an owner has accepted the addition to the Terms, recording begins for the readers who have agreed and for nobody else. You do not have to press anything else.

There are two ways to change it, and they are the same switch.

The button. Open Community, then the Email campaigns tab. Under your campaigns there is a small card headed Opens and clicks. It says in one sentence whether recording is on and how many of your people have agreed, and it carries one button: Turn off, or Turn on if it is already off. Press it and the sentence above it changes to the new state. Only an account owner sees the button; anybody else on the account sees the sentence, because the switch is the owner’s to move.

If the button is missing altogether, the card will say why in its sentence: bernard has not switched recording on across the platform yet, or has not yet switched your site on. Neither of those is yours to change, so there is no button for them. If it is your site that is not switched on yet, ask us.

Bernard in chat. Ask, in the Workshop or in Community:

Turn opens and clicks off for my emails.

Bernard reads the real state first, quotes the site and the current setting back to you, and waits for you to say yes. It changes nothing until you do, and it sends no email at any point.

Stopping never needs the Terms. An owner can switch recording off at any moment, whatever her account has or has not accepted, because stopping is always allowed.

Turning it back on is the direction that needs an owner to have accepted the addition to the Terms. If nobody has, the change is refused and you are told so. The card offers a link reading Read and accept the addition to the Terms, which takes you to the wording, and accepting it brings you straight back to the Email campaigns tab to press the button again. Bernard in chat refuses the same way and names the version and the page. That refusal is the answer, not a hurdle to work around: the Terms are what makes the recording lawful in the first place.

Either way the change is an account owner’s to make. Bernard will not do it on the word of anybody else.

If you would rather not record opens and clicks at all, switching it off is the whole answer. Nothing else about your campaigns changes.

What you see afterwards

Under a sent campaign, one sentence:

218 of 312 people had agreed to be counted. 118 opened, 41 clicked, and another 64 were fetched by a mail app and may not have been read.

The count of people who agreed comes first on purpose. It stops the second number being read as a rate over your whole list, which it is not. Underneath, a small table shows each link in the message, where it goes, and how many people pressed it. The table itself is counts, and you can ask Bernard for the people behind them. See Who clicked the link in my email?.

Reading it by person, and by campaign

There are two more ways in, and both are reads.

One person. Open somebody in Contacts and their page carries a section headed Opens and clicks, under the History of what was sent to them: what they opened, what they clicked, when, and which mail app, newest first, for as far back as the records go. Has this person opened anything I sent? is that page in full.

Their Details card also carries three dates bernard works out for you: when they last opened an email, when they last clicked a link, and when they last visited a course. Any of the three can show “Not known” instead of a date, with the plain reason why. When did this person last open an email, click a link, or visit a course? covers all three and every reason one can be empty.

Everybody who has been active lately. Ask Bernard who has opened or clicked, and he reads back the readers themselves, fifty at a time. You can narrow it to one campaign or to one link, and unless you say otherwise he looks at the last month, so say “in the last year” if you mean an older campaign. People whose only opens were fetched by a mail app are left out and counted separately.

That list is something to read, not an audience. Choosing who a campaign goes to by who opened or clicked is a later step and does not exist yet; if you ask, Bernard says so rather than quietly building a list and sending to it.

If recording is on but nobody in that particular campaign had agreed, the page says so in a sentence rather than showing you a row of zeros, because zeros would read as “nobody opened it” and that is a claim about people bernard never watched. If recording is off for the site altogether, it says that instead. They are different facts and bernard keeps them apart.

Why some opens are set aside

Mail apps have got busy. Several of the big ones fetch the images in a message before the person has looked at it, and some security systems press every link in a message to check it is safe. Both look exactly like a keen reader.

Bernard flags those and holds them out of the headline count, then tells you how many there were in the same sentence. It never deletes them and never hides them. The error runs in the safe direction: an open bernard is unsure about is reported as uncertain, never as a person who read your email.

That is also why bernard will not turn “no record” into “did not open”. If somebody’s only opens were flagged, they are unknown, not absent.

How long it is kept

For up to a year. After that the individual records are removed and only the campaign totals remain, so a campaign from two years ago still has its numbers but no longer has a per-person trail.

Where it fits

What happened after I sent my email campaign? is the rest of a campaign’s results: delivered, addresses retired, unsubscribed, complaints and the plain reason anything did not arrive. Is my email sending healthy? covers the redirect address in your setup checklist. For the whole path from writing to sending, start at How do email campaigns work?.