What Are Email Open Rates? Open rates are a measure of what percent of users opened your email. Open rates can be calculated on a unique and non-unique basis. Unique open rates only count one open for each recipient. Non-unique open rates count all opens regardless if a user opens the same email multiple times. Open rates are tracked by adding an invisible tracking pixel to emails. When a user opens the email the tracking pixel fires and tells the email sending service that it was opened.