Email communications – artistic impression. Image credit: Pixabay, free license
If we look back, email open rate was one of the most significant KPIs for email marketers. Impactful subject lines could achieve open rates of 30% to 40%, indicating active user engagement. Well, this has changed now.
Today, privacy policies, automated pre-loaders, and machine-based interactions skew the data more than they define user intent. The forward-thinking teams are now looking to metrics that clearly relate to actionable emails, their CTA, and revenue.
Why Open Rates Can No Longer Be Trusted?
Open rate data now reflects system behavior more than actual user engagement.
Flawed Tracking by Design
An email is marked as opened when the recipient’s email client downloads a tracking pixel. According to the dashboards, many users block images, so these emails are not marked as opened. Other clients can auto-download images, which leads to incorrect open rates.
Privacy Changes Broke the Model
In 2021, Apple launched its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature, which is estimated to dominate the email client market by 2023. MPP downloads email content, including tracking pixels, to a proxy server before the recipient has interacted with the email.
Apple now holds more than 50% share of email clients in the market, and most devices have MPP enabled. Consequently, MPP inflates email open rate tracking by 15-20%.
For example, one email newsletter saw its open-tracking rate increase from 28% to 55%, even though the number of recipients who actually opened the email did not change. Other email providers are also preloading email content.
Email Tracking Data Pollution by Machine Activity
Email security scanners, virus protection programs, and email-harvesting bots or web crawlers routinely open email messages and automatically download the tracking pixel, which marks an open for every scanned email. Each of these types of machines produces variable results in the data collected for mail delivery, and confuses what is considered an actual open event.
In email marketing, open rates are significantly influenced by actions like proxies, bots, and image settings instead of actual user actions.
Rethink Email Strategies Beyond Just Open Rates
The transition from vanity metrics to action metrics includes stronger, more benefit-driven CTAs, relevant content by segmentation and past purchases, and a seamless post-click experience. Check the following metrics for success at the entire funnel level:
- Inbox placement
- Clicks, and
- conversion
Brand visibility at the inbox level is becoming quite vital. BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) helps build your brand recognition and trust before your email is opened. When your logo appears next to emails in supported inboxes such as Gmail and Yahoo, it provides an opportunity to increase recognition of your brand before an email is opened. You can activate this visual trust with a verified checkmark via a BIMI certificate from a trusted VMC Certificate provider. BIMI is not intended to be a tracking solution; however, using BIMI will help enhance the perceived legitimacy and engagement of your email.
What Should You Track Instead?
Instead of tracking open rated, you should track metrices like:
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of emails you send that get at least one click on any link within them. Because it requires active user engagement, it serves as an excellent indicator of early engagement. Because it varies by industry and campaign type, good average CTRs generally fall in the range of 2-5%. Typically, campaigns have lower rates than automated flows.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate connects email activity with business results. For example, the conversion rate shows how many of your recipients made an online purchase or signed up, subscribed to your channel, or took any particular action that was a part of your conversion strategy.
You can calculate this metric accurately if you use UTM parameters or an Integrated Platform to pull conversion activity data. It directly indicates your ROI and can also indicate whether your landing pages are effective or your offers are valuable.
Reply Rate (Contextual but Significant)
When you send a B2B, sales, or lifecycle email, reply rate measures authentic human interest. For example, if you ask a customer a well-articulated question, it can lead to an extended conversation, something that your pixels do not show you, thus proving content relevancy.
Deliverability Metrics (often overlooked)
Email Must Reach the Inbox First:
- Bounce Rates (Expect an average of 2-3%): A high bounce rate (hard bounce) can damage your reputation with ISPs.
- Spam Complaints: An increase in spam complaints undermines your trust in providers.
- Unsubscribes: An indication of low relevance or over-sending.
Proper Authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), along with list hygiene, will help you manage these metrics. If your email is going to the spam folder, any of the metrics above will not matter.
The Biggest Problem: Opens Don’t Measure Engagement
An open is not indicative of understanding, reading, or taking any kind of action on an email. It does not measure the relevance of the content, user interest, or the impact on your business. There are many times when an “open” result occurs from habit or curiosity with no other action. Therefore, using click and action data, we can analyze what happens next after determining whether a legitimate “open” occurred.
Where Open Rates are Still Valuable (for a Short Time)
Open rates have limited value for calculating directional trends within the same list over a given time period, and in general for conducting cautious subject line A/B testing. When using open rates, you should simultaneously observe CTR and Conversions to form a basis for your decisions rather than using them independently. Open rates should not drive critical strategy decisions on their own.
Conclusion
The open rate is no longer an accurate measure of an email campaign’s success. It is now nothing more than a number rendered useless. Privacy tools have disrupted the old model, and machines no longer allow us to rely on old metrics. Real performance is a combination of engagement (clicks and replies), outcomes (conversions), and deliverability health. The major change is to stop asking “Did they open?” and start asking, “Did they act and what result did it deliver?” When teams implement this change, they will find that their email campaigns are becoming more effective and profitable.
