Email open rate: the metric that stopped telling the truth

An email open rate is measured by a single invisible image in the message. When the image loads, the send is recorded as opened — which worked tolerably until mail providers began fetching those images on the recipient's behalf, before anybody had looked at anything. On a list with a large share of Apple Mail users, reported opens can exceed fifty per cent while actual readership is unchanged, and the figure moves when providers change their behaviour rather than when your audience does.

What email open rate still tells you

• Relative movement within one audience over a short period, provided the mix of mail clients has not shifted.
• A sudden collapse, which usually means a deliverability problem rather than a content problem.
• Subject line tests, weakly — but only comparing two sends days apart to the same list.
• Nothing reliable about individuals. Marking one contact as engaged because a provider pre-fetched an image is how good contacts get the wrong treatment.
• Nothing comparable to industry benchmarks, which mix clients, regions and measurement eras.

What to judge a campaign on instead

Clicks, and what happened after them. A click is an action a person took, and the proportion of clicks to delivered mail is the honest engagement figure. Beyond that, the only numbers that matter are the ones further down: replies, sign-ups, purchases, bookings. A campaign with a modest click rate that produced eleven conversations is better than one with a high open rate that produced none, and the second is the one that gets reported as a success in most monthly updates.

Never build automation on opens alone. Sequences that branch on "opened but did not click" are now branching on whether somebody uses a particular mail app, which means a substantial part of your audience is being sorted by their choice of software rather than their interest.

Measuring what you can still trust

1. Report click rate against delivered rather than against sent, so bounces do not flatter the figure.
2. Track the one action the email existed to cause, and put that number beside the click rate.
3. Count unsubscribes and complaints as the quality signal they are — they are deliberate and therefore honest.
4. Watch the bounce rate as a list-health measure, which is independent of anybody's image settings.
5. Compare sends to the same list over time rather than to published benchmarks.
6. Define engagement for list hygiene by clicks over a period, never by opens.

Why it is still reported everywhere

Because it is large, it moves, and it is the first number every platform shows. A figure that goes up looks like progress, which makes open rate the most comfortable metric in marketing and one of the least informative. The practical answer is not to hide it but to stop making decisions with it: keep it on the report as context, put the click and the outcome above it, and never let it drive who gets which message.

Ettex Email reports delivered, clicks and unsubscribes beside opens rather than leading with the open figure, which keeps the comparison honest. Where mail is not arriving at all the question is a deliverability one and the open rate will mislead you about it, since an unseen message and an undelivered one look identical in that column.