Just to follow up on this thread.

We sent the email out and the only tracking I could implement was how many clicks we received for each link in the email. I could not track email openings with the tracking software we are using.

We have something of 400 + members on the site and we received about 100 clicks in total, granted some users could click more than 1 link. If I assume at least 2 clicks per person that means at least 50 opened the email.

I think that's a good response and I checked the email in Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail. It seemed to look really good and consistent. In Gmail the site logo was missing but I styled the alt text of the image and it seems to have worked well.