Email Marketing Success Metrics: Are Open Rates Dead?

Do you find yourself asking, “If my emails are being opened and seen, why is my audience not converting to customers?”

If yes, welcome to the post-open era of email marketing.

When you measure email performance, don’t sleep on opens.  

“Consumers are tired of being tracked and having data about them collected. They are fighting back. Email providers are pre-opening emails, diluting open rates, and more and more people are turning to disposable email addresses,” explains Hank Hoffmeier, Sr. Marketing Ops Manager, Kickbox. 

What this means is, opens do not necessarily translate to emails being seen and engaged with. Even if your ESP is reporting high opens, it guarantees nothing spectacular, at least with respect to sales.

“An active mailbox doesn’t mean they’re reading your emails,” asserts Steve Henderson, Head of Deliverability at SAP Emarsys. 

Henceforth, you’ll have to learn how to look beyond opens to truly understand campaign performance. 

We’ve been in the industry long enough to have witnessed the evolution of opens—from being used to gauge subject lines to being the basis of customer journeys to being declared dead. Today, in terms of strategy and performance analysis, the ground has shifted, so you’ll need to change gear accordingly. 

So let’s find out how the perspective around open rates has changed, to what extent it affects you, and which email marketing KPIs you should track. 

What is an open rate?

Why opens are become less reliable

Limitations of open rates

Tools for Advanced Email Analytics

The final verdict

What is an open rate?  

The percentage of receivers who open an email is known as the open rate.

The open rate is computed by dividing the number of emails delivered by the number of emails opened. Marketers have been using this statistic for years to determine whether an email caught the audience’s attention and how appealing the subject lines and overall campaign success. However, recent developments have led to a significant decline in the reliability of this metric.

Why opens are become less reliable

Several factors contribute to the diminishing reliability of open rates. The most common ones are tabulated below.

Recent privacy initiatives, such as Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, have dramatically altered the landscape of email tracking. These changes prevent senders from accurately determining when an email is opened, rendering traditional open rate metrics increasingly unreliable. 

Now then, as open rates lose their significance, marketers must pivot to more meaningful metrics that truly reflect engagement and campaign success: 

• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Revenue per email
• List growth rate
• Unsubscribe rate

Now that we’ve examined the shifting landscape of email marketing metrics, let’s delve deeper into the limitations of open rates and why they may no longer be the best indicator of campaign success.

Limitations of open rates

Email open rates have long been considered a key metric for measuring email campaign success. However, they come with significant technical limitations that can lead to inaccurate measurements. 

Some of these technical limitations include image blocking, preview panes, text-only screen readers, and of course, privacy features. 

The disconnect between opens and engagement

While open rates can and do offer some insight, they often fail to capture true engagement. Consider these points:

• An opened email doesn’t guarantee the content was read or acted upon.
  
• Some subscribers may engage with your brand without opening emails (e.g., visiting your website directly).
  
• High open rates might mask low click-through or conversion rates.

The disconnect was particularly pronounced in the case of one of our recent clients. Their ESP had been reporting a 35-40% avg. open rate. However, their click-through rates were consistently low, and their conversion rate stood at less than 1%. The following plot captures the plummet. 

On the face of it, the disconnect could be due to a lot of factors like accidental opens, scan-only viewers, uncapped sends, poor design, etc. 

But as our team discovered, in this case, their ESP was the culprit. 

The system was capturing all opens, including those opened automatically by the email clients of their subscribers. 

How open rates can be misleading

Open rates can lead marketers astray in several ways:

• False sense of success: High open rates might not translate to actual business outcomes.
• Misallocation of resources: Focusing too much on opens can divert attention from more meaningful metrics.
• Overlooking engaged subscribers: Some highly engaged subscribers might not register opens due to technical issues.

To truly understand email marketing performance, you need to look beyond open rates and consider a more holistic set of metrics that better reflect engagement and business impact.

Advanced analytics: Email open rate alternatives

1. AI tools

AI-powered email marketing platforms are revolutionizing the way businesses analyze and optimize their email campaigns. These advanced tools leverage machine learning algorithms to provide deeper insights and automate complex tasks. Here’s a comparison of some popular AI-powered platforms. 

2. Heat mapping & user behavior analysis

Heat mapping tools offer a visual representation of how subscribers interact with your emails. These insights can help you:

• Identify the most clicked areas of your emails
• Optimize content placement for maximum engagement
• Understand scroll depth and reading patterns

Popular heat mapping tools for email include Litmus and Email on Acid, which provide detailed reports on subscriber behavior and device preferences.

If you’re already doing heat mapping, consider extending it to your web pages as well, not just email. Especially if you’re an e-com brand. 

As marketing strategist Loren McDonald has argued, “Website heat maps can help email marketers discover hover and click patterns of site visitors and better understand how the email content is affecting site behavior.”

3. Integrating email data with CRM

Connecting your email marketing data with your CRM system creates a holistic view of customer interactions. Benefits include:

• Personalized email content based on customer history
• Improved lead scoring and segmentation
• Enhanced customer journey mapping
• More accurate ROI calculations

Some of the popular CRM integrations for email marketing include Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, and Marketo.

4. Predictive analytics for email performance

Predictive analytics uses historical data and machine learning to forecast future email performance. Key applications include:

• Churn prediction and prevention
• Customer lifetime value estimation
• Content recommendation engines
• Send time optimization

These advanced tools and technologies provide a more comprehensive understanding of email campaign performance, helping marketers move beyond open rates to more meaningful metrics and strategies. 

The final verdict

Despite the changing email landscape, it’d be incorrect to conclude that open rates are dead. As Chad S. White points out, opens are useful for:

• Understanding campaign engagement
• Measuring click-to-open rates
• Identifying email deliverability problems
• Managing subscriber inactivity

Of these, click-to-open rate—one of the most important email engagement metrics—is quite helpful as it tells you to what extent your subscribers are engaging with an email. 

In addition, you can also measure the effectiveness of your CTAs through the CTOR. 

But yes, overall email success can no longer be accurately determined by open rates. Marketers now need to concentrate on more important metrics like clicks, conversions, and revenue due to tracking restrictions and privacy regulations. You can optimize for genuine interaction and obtain deeper insights by utilising AI, heat mapping, and CRM integration. It’s time to adopt more intelligent email marketing strategies and go beyond open rates.

Need help with email marketing? Our six-tier framework is incorporated into more than 500 campaigns every month. Book a call today!