Should you care about email open rates?

Let’s start with a shocker:

Email open rates are inaccurate.

Recipients and their email service providers can mess up open tracking in various ways, skewing your precious open rate data.

It’s gotten to the point where other metrics are now better engagement indicators, like reply or click-through rates.

You’ll still want to track your open rate, but it’s no longer an essential nor accurate metric.

Getting your open rate percentage

In most cases you won’t be calculating your open rate manually.

Most email-sending tools will do it for you; see lemlist below:

But if you want to do it manually, you just divide the number of opens by the number of emails sent.

So, if you sent 1000 emails and got 500 opens, your open rate is 50%. 500 divided by 1000 is 0.5, or 50%.

Easy peasy…

Why are email open rates inaccurate? 🤷‍♂️

As mentioned above, the email open rate is no longer accurate.

You cannot know whether you have a good email open rate anymore.

Here’s the simple reason why:

Either open tracking gets blocked or it does get loaded but without the recipient actually opening the email.

To give you a clearer picture of how that happens, here are specific situations in which open tracking gets messed up:

• ➡️ Recipients have turned off open tracking. With Apple Mail’s Privacy Protection, images and content (including the tracking pixel) are preloaded before the user opens the email. With this feature enabled, every mail sent to an Apple account will result in an open, even if the recipient never opens the email!
• ➡️ Recipients have disabled images or external content for their emails. In this case, nothing external can be downloaded, including the tracking pixel. If the tracking pixel does not get loaded, opens won’t register.
• ➡️ Emails over 100kb may get clipped and not downloaded in their entirety, meaning the tracking pixel never gets loaded.
• ➡️ Some email providers like Gmail, block images from untrusted or unknown senders. For email outreach this may mean that the tracking pixel doesn’t get loaded.

If not open rates, then what? ❓❓

Since you should no longer care much about open rates, you need to look at other metrics to measure your success more accurately.

These could be:

• ➡️ Your conversation rate: Perhaps a crude metric to measure engagement with, but ultimately, it’s what matters most. You could use the number of meetings booked, or just track the money earned.
• ➡️ Click-through rate: If your emails contain links, then the click-through rate is a good engagement metric to track. After all, if people are not interested, they won’t click your links.
• ➡️ Interested replies: If people show interest in what you offer, it’s a clear engagement signal. Remember only to count the replies if clear interest is expressed.

Important: Even though open rates are no longer accurate, you still have to follow all the best practices to improve your open rate. Open rates still exist. You just can’t track email open rates accurately anymore.

If you want to learn more about open rates, read:  What is email open rate and how do you calculate it?