Why email open rates don't matter like they used to

The email open rate is traditionally the easiest to understand lifecycle marketing metric. And it makes sense - we want to know how many unique users opened (viewed) our emails message.

But if I had a dollar for every time someone outside of marketing asked about the open rate of a campaign...

TLDR; Open rates are no longer accurate on Apple.

In 2021 Apple launched Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in order to help their users, take further control of their data. The short of this is, is that anyone using an Apple device with iOS 15 or higher will be prompted when first opening their Mail app to choose if they would like to protect their privacy. If the user selects yes, MPP hides their IP address from an open being logged.

What does this mean for senders?

In general, the theme seems to be that open rates are inflated, meaning you might see an even higher open rate than what's actually occurring.

What can you do?

My advice is to basically start assuming your open rates aren't completely accurate. While this doesn't mean you should completely ignore open rates, but we should probably start re-training our coworkers that asking about the open rate of a campaign isn't the best question.

Keep testing open rates against your new benchmark (you can still gain directional understanding,) but focus on email engagement, or clicks. Another way to think about this is yes, run easy A/B tests to try and boost open rates, but spend the majority of your time, effort and voice optimizing for the click.

Email open rates still obviously matter, but the new world decided that you're tracking them just isn't going to be very accurate. So, whenever you're thinking about, or discussing open rates, keep this in the back of your mind.

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