DM open rate

Instagram DM open rate is the share of contacts who opened a DM you sent them. In Inrō, a DM campaign's open rate is its Opened count divided by its Sent count: the contacts Instagram reported as having read a message from it, out of the contacts the campaign reached.

How does Inrō calculate DM open rate?

Inrō counts contacts, not messages:

• Sent counts each contact who received at least one message from the campaign. Contacts a campaign does not message, such as a contact with a DM opt-out or one on your spam list, are not in it.
• Opened counts each contact for whom Instagram reported a read on one of those messages. Instagram sends that report to apps as a messaging_seen notification (Meta for Developers, Instagram messaging webhooks, checked 1 October 2026).
• A contact counts once, however many messages they read. Send a test does not count.

So the rate can only be as precise as what Instagram reports as read. How an Instagram DM read receipt reaches Inrō, and why a read can go uncounted, has its own entry.

You see the rate as Opened on the Campaigns page, on each campaign and under Recent campaigns on your dashboard, and the counts come back in a campaign's metrics through the Inrō API. Each message step shows Sent and Read counts, in DM campaigns and in comment-to-DM automations alike. Click Read to list the contacts who opened it.

What is a good Instagram DM open rate?

The median campaign open rate is 67% in Inrō production data, and the top quartile of campaigns reaches 82%. Half of all campaigns open below 67%.

Higher open rates, like the one in the WeInk case study, come from the best-performing campaigns. They are real results, but the median is the fairer benchmark for a typical campaign.

Can you compare it with an email open rate?

Not directly: they measure different events. A DM open is a read that Instagram reports for a message in the thread. An email open depends on what the recipient's mail app lets the sender see. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, for one, prevents senders from seeing if you opened their email (Apple Support, Use Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone, checked 1 October 2026).

Compare a campaign with your own earlier campaigns instead. They use the same Opened over Sent rule, so the two numbers measure the same thing.

What happens after the open has its own measures: DM click-through rate for the link inside the message, and DM reply rate for the answers. More terms are in the Instagram automation glossary.