How to Track Email Opens in Outlook - Methods That Work

Need to track opens on the emails you send with Outlook?

We’ll explore several methods to help you know whether your recipient has read your email.

There are two main ways to track opens in Outlook: 1. Using built-in features, and 2. Leveraging third-party tools.

Let’s discuss both options below. ⬇️

Outlook’s Built-in Features for Tracking Opens

Outlook offers two native features that can help you track opens.

Unfortunately, they are somewhat limited for sales outreach.

Still, for basic tracking needs, they can be helpful.

Read receipts ✅

When sending an email with Outlook, you can include a read receipt request.

Upon opening the email, the recipient sees a little pop-up asking them to confirm that they’ve read (or opened) it.

Read receipts are often used when sending time-sensitive materials that require immediate attention, such as a contract, report, or proposal.

Read receipts requests offer transparent open tracking. However, most people consider them intrusive.

Here’s how to request a read receipt in Outlook:

1 ➡️ Log in to your Outlook account and click on new

2 ➡️ Write your email

3 ➡️ Go to the options tab on the ribbon

4 ➡️ Check the “Request read receipt” option

5 ➡️ Send your email

It’s important to know that recipients can disable receiving read receipts or that their email client doesn’t support them. In both scenarios, open tracking won’t work.

Sending read receipts is not a scalable way of tracking opens, but it may be sufficient for monitoring a small number of emails.

Viva Insights 💡

Viva Insights is an Outlook add-on that comes with Office 365 but can also be purchased separately.

This add-on can help you track open rates but only for emails sent within your organization.

Viva Insights comes with some other drawbacks, too:

• ❌ It only tracks open rates for emails sent to at least five recipients.
• ❌ The open rate isn’t that accurate, either. For emails sent to 10 recipients or fewer, the open rate falls between 25% and 75%, regardless of the actual open rate. If it’s 5%, it will still say 25%. If you send to more than 10 people, the range will be between 10% and 95%.
• ❌ It excludes emails sent over 14 days ago when calculating the open rate.
• ❌ The open rate isn’t calculated in real time. Viva Insights may take up to 30 minutes after sending an email to start providing data.

Conclusion?

Viva Insights can be a handy tool for tracking opens within your organization, but that’s about it. It’s not a solution for tracking the open rates of your outreach.

Third-Party Solutions for Tracking Opens in Outlook 🧩

Outlook’s open tracking features are too limited for professional outreach.

For scalable open tracking in Outlook, you need external solutions.

We’ll review three of them below.

Mailsuite

With Mailsuite, you can track email opens right from your Outlook inbox and see all the tracking data without leaving Outlook.

You can also access the detailed tracking history of every email you send and get real-time notifications when someone opens your email.

lemlist

lemlist is a sales engagement tool that allows you to integrate your Outlook account into the platform.

This allows you to use your Outlook account to send emails with lemlist.

The best part is that lemlist will track opens for any email you send and give you detailed stats on how your campaign is performing, including link clicks, reply rate, and meetings booked.

And while you don’t see any stats in your Outlook account (lemlist only), you can still answer your replies from your Outlook account, too.

With lemlist, you can do multichannel outreach that goes beyond email or Outlook. You can create sequences combining email, LinkedIn messages (text and voice), and cold calls.

Yesware

Yesware offers an Outlook add-on that lets you track opens in your inbox.

Tracking opens requires no extra steps. You can write and send emails as you normally do, and you will be notified when someone opens them.

Yesware also provides other stats, such as link clicks, and compiles data into easy-to-read dashboards.

The Problem with Open Tracking ⚠️

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the open rate was a reliable stat.

Nowadays, however, both email service providers and recipients have settings at their disposal that can significantly skew your open rate data—so much so that some people wonder if we should even pay attention to open rates anymore!

For example, Apple Mail users can turn on Privacy Protection, which preloads images (including the tracking pixel) and content before they open the email.

The result?

Any email you send to Apple Mail users with this feature enabled will result in an open, even if the recipient never actually opened the email. In other words, your open rates will be inflated.

The opposite scenario is also common:

When recipients or email service providers block images or external content from their emails, the tracking pixel isn’t allowed to load.

If the tracking pixel can’t do its job, no opens will be registered, even when the recipient actually opened the email. In this case, your open rates will be deflated.

That said:

You still want to monitor your open rate because while it won't reliably show the actual number of people opening your emails, it can still provide valuable insights into the overall performance of your email campaigns and help you identify trends and areas for improvement.

Maximize Your Email Insights 📈

You can do basic open tracking from within Outlook itself.

But for scalable open tracking, you need a third-party solution.

The only way to know how your campaigns perform is through detailed tracking that third-party solutions offer.

These tools track opens and provide insights into click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversions—all essential outreach stats.