Summary
Understanding why email performance might be poor despite a seemingly high open rate is crucial for effective email marketing. The traditional open rate metric has become less reliable due to advancements like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which can artificially inflate these numbers by pre-fetching emails. This often creates a misleading picture, masking underlying issues such as low engagement or problems with sender reputation. Instead of solely focusing on open rates, a holistic approach considering metrics like click-through rates, conversions, and opt-out rates provides a more accurate assessment of email campaign success. Poor performance often stems from sending emails to untargeted audiences, which can lead to high unsubscribe rates and ultimately harm your ability to reach the inbox in the future.
Key findings
- Inflated open rates: Apple's Mail Privacy Protection can cause reported open rates to be significantly higher than actual human opens, as emails are pre-fetched by proxy servers.
- Low engagement: A high open rate coupled with a very low click-through rate (CTR) indicates that recipients are not engaging with the content or call to action (CTA).
- High opt-out rates: An unusually high unsubscribe rate points to issues with audience targeting, content relevance, or sending frequency, signaling to mailbox providers that your content may be unwanted.
- Sender reputation risk: Negative engagement metrics, even with high reported opens, can damage your sender reputation and lead to future deliverability problems. More on why your emails might be going to spam.
Key considerations
- Shift focus to clicks and conversions: Prioritize metrics that reflect actual user action and business goals, such as click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTOR), and conversion rates, as these provide a clearer picture of campaign effectiveness.
- Evaluate audience targeting: Ensure your emails are sent to a highly segmented and relevant audience. Sending to broadly targeted lists can lead to low engagement despite high opens. You can learn how to diagnose and improve deliverability and open rates.
- Optimize content and CTA: Review your email content for clarity, value, and compelling calls to action that encourage recipients to take the desired next step.
- Educate stakeholders: Help your team understand the evolving landscape of email metrics and why open rates alone are no longer sufficient to gauge true performance. Consider resources such as Mailchimp's article on CTOR vs. Open Rate.
What email marketers say
Email marketers frequently encounter the challenge of explaining campaign performance when open rates look good but other metrics are poor. This often stems from a team's traditional reliance on open rates as the primary indicator of success. The consensus among marketers points to the distorting effect of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) on open metrics, necessitating a deeper dive into engagement signals like clicks, opt-outs, and conversions. Marketers highlight the importance of aligning email goals with measurable actions beyond just an open.
Key opinions
- MPP distortion: Many marketers report that a significant portion of their recorded opens are due to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, especially with consumer-heavy lists, rendering the open rate unreliable.
- True open rate: For audiences predominantly using Apple products, the actual human open rate is likely much lower than reported, perhaps even below 30%.
- CTA clarity: A very low click-through rate alongside a high open rate often signals that the email's call to action isn't clear or compelling, or that MPP is skewing data.
- Beyond vanity metrics: It's common to get caught up in vanity metrics like open rates, but marketers advocate for focusing on the ultimate goals of each campaign, such as transactions or website visits.
- Off-email conversions: Some users might see an email and then directly go to an app or website to convert, bypassing the email's click-through tracking. Learn how to increase your email click-through rate.
Key considerations
- Funnel visualization: Presenting email performance as a funnel (inbox placement → open → click → conversion) helps teams understand the true journey and identify bottlenecks beyond just the open.
- Cost vs. undesirable action: Marketers should highlight the cost of effort for emails that generate few clicks but high opt-outs, emphasizing that losing future communication opportunities is detrimental.
- Audience alignment: Sending emails to an untargeted audience, even if it seems harmless, can significantly increase opt-out rates and negatively impact sender reputation. Consider understanding your email domain reputation.
- Education is key: Marketers need to educate their internal teams on modern email deliverability nuances and why metrics like open rate alone are insufficient, often necessitating interactive presentations.
- First send considerations: A higher opt-out rate is often observed on the first email sent to subscribers after a period of time, underscoring the importance of managing expectations and segmenting lists carefully. Validity also has a useful article on inflated open rates.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that Apple Mail Privacy Protection significantly inflates reported open rates, especially for consumer-heavy lists. They often see anywhere from 50-90% of recorded opens attributed to MPP. This makes the traditional open rate metric less reliable for assessing actual human engagement.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks points out that if the audience primarily uses Apple products, the actual (true) open rate could be much lower, potentially around 30% or less. This highlights the need for marketers to contextualize their open rate data given their audience demographics.
What the experts say
Experts in email deliverability and marketing analytics largely agree that the open rate, while historically important, has become an increasingly flawed metric due to technological changes like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and various security scanners. They emphasize that true email performance is indicated by downstream metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates. Experts consistently advise shifting focus from vanity metrics to actions that drive tangible business results, highlighting that a high opt-out rate or low engagement can severely impact sender reputation and future inbox placement.
Key opinions
- Focus on actionable metrics: Experts stress that while a high open rate might seem positive, it's the click-through rate (CTR) or click-to-open rate (CTOR) that truly indicates engagement and interest in the email's content.
- Reputation impacts: A high opt-out rate, even for a smaller list, signals a mismatch between content and audience expectation, which can negatively impact sender reputation over time and affect future deliverability.
- Beyond the open: Mailbox providers use multiple signals beyond opens to assess engagement, including clicks, replies, and forwards, to determine inbox placement. Learn more about email deliverability issues.
- Content relevance: Even with high open rates from pre-fetching, a low click-to-open rate (CTOR) indicates that the content itself failed to drive the desired action, pointing to a content or call-to-action issue.
- Delivery vs. engagement: Deliverability issues, such as emails landing in spam or being blocked by a blocklist, can suppress true engagement metrics despite reported high opens from bots or pre-fetching. Our guide on blocklists covers this in depth.
Key considerations
- Comprehensive performance view: Email performance should always be evaluated within the context of the overall marketing funnel, where the ultimate goal is typically conversion, not merely an open. This offers a more accurate view of ROI.
- Audience segmentation: An untargeted email send, even to a relatively small list, can significantly harm sender reputation by generating high negative engagement (opt-outs, spam complaints).
- Metrics understanding: Experts acknowledge that open rates have inherent limitations in accuracy, making it crucial for marketers to understand these limitations and prioritize other engagement metrics for better insights.
- Deliverability checks: It's essential to regularly monitor deliverability to ensure emails are reaching the inbox, as this is the foundational step for any engagement to occur. SocketLabs provides further insights on email performance red flags.
Expert view
Expert from SpamResource.com emphasizes that focusing solely on vanity metrics like open rates can obscure deeper deliverability and engagement problems. This is particularly true with the widespread prevalence of proxy opens, which give a false sense of success while underlying issues persist.
Expert view
Expert from Mailchimp explains that while a high open rate might seem positive, it's the click-through rate (CTR) or click-to-open rate (CTOR) that truly indicates engagement and interest in the email's content. They recommend looking beyond opens to understand user interaction.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and research consistently highlight the evolving nature of email metrics, particularly the open rate. With the advent of privacy features and security scans, the traditional open rate has become less reliable as a standalone indicator of engagement. Instead, documentation points towards a more sophisticated understanding of email performance that emphasizes click-through rates, conversion tracking, and the overall impact on sender reputation. It underscores that true engagement goes beyond a mere 'open' and requires attention to audience relevance and clear calls to action.
Key findings
- Open rate inflation: Official reports confirm that email open rates are frequently inflated, sometimes by a factor of two or three, primarily due to automated pre-fetching by security software and privacy features like Apple MPP.
- Importance of MR: Metrics like Mailing List Response Magnitude (MR) are increasingly emphasized as more critical than simple open rates, focusing on actual user response and engagement.
- CTR as a key indicator: Documentation often defines a good CTR within specific ranges (e.g., 2-5%), positioning it as a more reliable metric for email campaign effectiveness compared to open rates.
- Deliverability impact: Even with high reported opens, poor deliverability (e.g., emails landing in spam) fundamentally hinders true engagement, emphasizing that inbox placement is foundational. You can also review why your email open rates are low.
Key considerations
- Holistic metric analysis: It's essential to move beyond single vanity metrics and analyze a combination of metrics—including clicks, conversions, and unsubscribe rates—to truly understand email performance.
- Content and CTA optimization: Focus on creating highly relevant content with clear, compelling calls to action to drive genuine engagement and improve CTRs, which are less susceptible to false positives than opens.
- Audience segmentation and hygiene: Maintain a healthy and engaged subscriber list through proper segmentation and regular list hygiene to minimize irrelevant sends and high opt-out rates, which are critical for sender reputation.
- Prioritize deliverability: Regularly monitor and improve your email deliverability rates, as even the best content cannot perform if it doesn't reach the intended inbox. Explore what a simple guide to DMARC, SPF, and DKIM reveals about email authentication.
Technical article
Documentation from Validity emphasizes that email open rates are frequently inflated, sometimes up to three times higher than actual human opens. This phenomenon is largely due to the pervasive use of security scanners and privacy features that pre-fetch email content, making raw open rates an unreliable indicator of genuine engagement.
Technical article
Documentation from ISIPP SuretyMail introduces Mailing List Response Magnitude (MR) as a critical metric for email performance. This documentation asserts that MR is significantly more important than simple list size or even basic open rates, as it focuses on the quality of actual user engagement and the overall response to the email campaign.
Related resources
15 resources
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