Open Rate

The open rate is the share of the people you emailed who look like they opened it. Send it to a thousand addresses, count two hundred opens, and the report proudly says twenty per cent. That line has sat at the top of every email report for twenty years, which is a shame, because it is now the least trustworthy figure on the page.

The reason is that an open is not really an open. Your mail tool hides a picture in the message, one dot wide and invisible, and when the mail program fetches that picture from the tool's server, the tool writes down an open. So the figure counts one event and nothing more, which is that a picture was loaded. Somebody who reads every word with images switched off is therefore recorded as never having opened it.

Since 2021, Apple Mail has fetched those pictures itself, on Apple's own servers, for every message that arrives. So anyone reading on an iPhone with Mail Privacy Protection switched on counts as an opener before they have even glanced at the list. On many lists that is half the audience. That is why open rates jumped that year with no change in behaviour at all, and plenty of teams quietly took the credit.

So the honest numbers are the ones that need a hand to move them. A click is a real action by a real person, and it survives image blocking, while a reply tells you even more. Best of all is the outcome you wanted in the first place, whether that is an order paid, a form filled in or a call booked. Measure those against the number of emails you sent, and the picture stops flattering you.

The one job opens can still do is settle a subject line, so test two of them on the same list in the same week. If the gap is wide the winner probably is the winner, and anything narrower than that is only noise. Watch the unsubscribe and complaint lines as well, because those two are honest and they hurt. When Linkysoft builds reporting into a web application, the email figures sit next to the orders they produced rather than on a screen of their own. That same digital marketing team at Linkysoft still reports the open rate, and still refuses to let a client decide anything on it alone.