Email marketing remains one of the most powerful ways to connect with customers, nurture relationships, and drive measurable business results. But for years, one number dominated how campaigns were judged: the email marketing open rate.
While open rates once served as the go-to benchmark, shifts in email technology, privacy updates, and user behaviour mean they are no longer a reliable measure of success. If your email strategy still leans on open rates, it’s time for a rethink.
In this blog, we’ll break down what open rate means in marketing, why it’s now considered outdated, and the metrics you should focus on instead to optimise your email marketing strategy for true performance and ROI.
Why Open Rates Are No Longer Relevant
Changes in Email Technology
Current email platforms work differently than they did a few years ago, making open rate data inconsistent:
- Image blocking: Many email clients block images by default, which means that the email might be opened, but not counted due to the absence of image loading.
- Dark Mode: In dark mode, the preview text often replaces the subject line in many email clients, which can skew open rate data.
- Pre-headers: Pre-headers also influence how emails are viewed but may not always register correctly in open rate tracking.
The result? Your open rate may not reflect actual audience engagement.
Privacy Updates (Apple Mail Privacy Protection)
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) changed the game. By preloading email content on their servers, MPP makes it impossible to know if a user genuinely opened your email. This inflates open rates and renders them unreliable.
User Behaviour
An “open” doesn’t equal interest. Many users open an email only to preview it briefly or engage with only part of the content. Email open rates don’t tell you how much of the content was actually viewed or whether any action was taken. For instance, someone might open an email and then close it without clicking or interacting with any content.
The Key Metrics That Matter Now
Given these challenges with open rates, it’s clear that engagement metrics are now the true indicators of success. Click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement rates provide more meaningful insights into how your audience is interacting with your content, making them more reliable metrics for campaign success.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your email. It directly measures engagement and interest in your email content, providing insight into how well the email resonates with your audience. A higher CTR indicates that your content is engaging and compelling.
CTR is a more reliable metric than email open rates because it shows tangible actions taken by recipients, not just the initial act of opening an email.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate measures how many recipients took a desired action after clicking through an email (e.g., making a purchase, signing up for a webinar).
Conversion rates provide a direct connection between email campaigns and business goals such as revenue, sign-ups, or downloads. Tracking conversion rates helps marketers assess whether their campaigns are meeting the intended business objectives.
For email marketers, conversion rates are one of the most important metrics to determine ROI (Return on Investment).
Engagement Rate
The engagement rate is the percentage of recipients who interact with your email in some way, such as clicking a link, replying, or forwarding the email. It’s a more holistic metric, indicating how interested your audience is in the content you’re providing.
A higher engagement rate often leads to more conversions and reflects a well-targeted and relevant campaign.
Compared to open rates, engagement rates are a stronger indicator of campaign success. They tell you not only if your email was opened but also whether your recipients found the content valuable enough to engage with it.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opt out of receiving future emails.
Monitoring unsubscribes is crucial because a high unsubscribe rate can indicate that your content is not resonating with your audience or that the frequency of your emails is too high. Regularly tracking unsubscribe rates helps maintain a healthy and engaged email list.
Why Engagement Metrics Drive Better ROI
While open rates can provide a snapshot of an email’s reach, engagement metrics give a deeper understanding of how recipients are interacting with your content.
- Quality over quantity: Engagement metrics provide more meaningful insights into how your audience interacts with your content. Clicks, conversions, and engagement all represent tangible actions that indicate interest and intent, offering more valuable data than a simple open.
- Predicting future actions: High engagement is predictive of future interactions. If recipients engage with your emails, they are more likely to act again in the future, whether that means opening another email or completing a purchase.
- Adjusting content and strategy: Engagement metrics provide actionable insights that help marketers refine their content, segment their audience, and optimise future campaigns to increase ROI. By focusing on engagement, marketers can continuously improve and customise their email strategies to deliver better results over time.
When combined with insights from channels like social media marketing, these metrics provide a clearer view of how email fits into your overall digital strategy.
Best Practices for Tracking and Reporting New Metrics
To ensure you’re tracking the right email marketing metrics, follow these best practices:
- Use Email Marketing Platforms: Leverage tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or Klaviyo to track CTR, conversion rates, and engagement rates.
- Set Up Tracking Parameters: Use UTM codes to track conversions from email campaigns in Google Analytics. This allows you to measure how much traffic and revenue are generated from specific email campaigns.
- Measure Across the Customer Journey: Integrate email performance metrics with your broader marketing efforts. Track how emails contribute to overall goals like sales, leads, or user engagement.
- Test and Iterate: Regularly A/B test your email subject lines, CTAs, content, and images to optimise for the best engagement and conversion results.
Future of Email Marketing Metrics
As privacy policies evolve and email technology advances, the metrics you track today may change.
- Evolving technology and privacy concerns: With increasing privacy concerns, email marketers will need to adapt to new ways of measuring performance, especially with updates like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.
- Rising importance of customer journey mapping: In the future, email marketers will need to look at performance within a broader multi-channel strategy, incorporating data from all touchpoints to assess how emails fit into the entire customer journey.
- Automation and personalisation: As email automation and personalisation become more sophisticated, engagement metrics will be even more relevant. By targeting the right audience with relevant content, engagement will rise, and ROI will improve.
Open rates may have served as a benchmark in the past, but in today’s email landscape, they’re no longer meaningful. Instead, focusing on CTRs, conversions, engagement, and unsubscribe rates provides the insights you need to refine campaigns and boost ROI.
It’s time to shift your perspective. Stop chasing vanity metrics and start measuring what truly matters, so your email campaigns can deliver long-term growth and measurable business results.
