Latest / The Email Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Newsletters, Open Rates, and Subscriber Growth / Why Email Open Rate Is a Vanity Metric You Should Ignore
Transcript
- Lucas: So, Luna, I want to talk about a metric that's probably sitting front and center in every email marketer's dashboard, but I think it's become almost useless. Luna: Let me guess — open rate? Lucas: Bingo. Open rate has been the gold standard for decades, but thanks to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and Google's image caching, it's now a glorified guess. A 2025 Litmus study found that B2C newsletter open rates have climbed to an average of 35 percent, yet actual engagement — clicks, conversions, replies — stayed flat or dropped. Luna: So we're celebrating inflated numbers. That's dangerous if you're making decisions based on them. Lucas: Exactly. If you think a 40 percent open rate means your subject line is killing it, but your click to open rate is 8 percent, you're actually underperforming. The open pixel is broken. Luna: Let's break down why. Apple's MPP, which launched in 2021, pre-fetches emails in the background. So every recipient, whether they opened or not, gets counted as an open if they use Apple Mail. Lucas: Right. And now Google's doing something similar with its image proxy. They cache images, so the tracking pixel fires even if the email sits unread in the inbox. A 2024 study from Email on Acid estimated that MPP inflated open rates by 15 to 20 percent across the board. Luna: Which means if you're A/B testing subject lines based on open rate, you're basically comparing noise to noise. Lucas: Exactly. So what should we measure instead? I'd argue the most reliable metric is click to open rate, or CTOR. It tells you, of the people who actually saw your email — or at least whose pixels fired — how many found it compelling enough to click. Luna: CTOR filters out the MPP noise because it's a ratio of unique clicks to unique opens. If your open count is inflated, both numerator and denominator are affected, but the ratio stays more stable. Lucas: Right. And for campaigns where the goal isn't a click — say, a purely awareness-driven newsletter — you can look at reply rate or forward rate. Those are hard metrics that require real human action. Luna: I've also seen brands pivot to measuring 'engaged time' — how long a subscriber spends reading an email if it's rendered in a client that supports that. But that's still niche. Lucas: Yeah, that's early-stage. Let me give you a concrete case. There's a DTC skincare brand called Ourself — not a client of mine, but I studied their shift. In early 2024, they stopped optimizing for open rate entirely. They switched to CTOR and conversion rate only. Luna: What happened? Lucas: Their open rate actually dropped by 12 percent over six months, because they stopped writing clickbait subject lines designed to trick people into opening. But their click to open rate went from 9 percent to 14 percent, and their revenue per email rose 22 percent. Luna: That's the whole argument in a nutshell. Open rate isn't a business metric. It's a vanity metric that makes you feel good without telling you if your emails are working. Lucas: And it leads to bad behavior. Marketers start writing subject lines that are misleading or overly sensational just to get that open. Then the subscriber opens once, doesn't find value, and eventually unsubscribes or marks as spam. Luna: Which hurts deliverability in the long run. So what do you recommend as a replacement dashboard? What should the key three metrics be? Lucas: I'd say: one, click to open rate. Two, conversion rate — whether that's a purchase, a sign-up, or a download. And three, list health metrics: unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate, and list growth rate. If your list is growing and spam complaints are below 0.1 percent, you're in good shape. Luna: And how often should someone check open rate? Should they just ignore it entirely? Lucas: I'd say don't ignore it, but don't optimize for it. Use it as a sanity check — if your open rate suddenly drops to 5 percent, something might be wrong with deliverability. But if it's between 20 and 40 percent, don't read into it. Focus on the metrics that tie to revenue. Luna: That reminds me of a quote from an email consultant I heard: 'Stop trying to get people to open your emails. Start trying to get them to look forward to them.' Lucas: That's exactly right. And that shift — from open-rate optimization to value delivery — is what separates the pros from the amateurs. If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used, we'd love it if you supported the show. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep these episodes ad-free and focused on what matters, not on selling you something. Lucas: Exactly. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep the lights on. Luna: And we really appreciate everyone who has. Let's get back to the metrics. Lucas, you mentioned conversion rate — how do you track that accurately when the conversion happens off-email, like a website visit? Lucas: Great question. You need UTM parameters and a proper analytics setup. Tag every link with source equals email, medium equals newsletter, campaign equals whatever you're running. Then use Google Analytics or your platform of choice to attribute conversions back to that campaign. Luna: But that's not perfect either, right? Cross-device attribution is a mess. Lucas: It is. But it's still far better than open rate. At least you're tracking actual behavior. One thing I'd add: don't forget about list segmentation. A high CTOR on a small, well-targeted segment is worth more than a low CTOR on your entire list. Luna: So the takeaway is: stop staring at open rates as a success metric. Look at what happens after the open. Lucas: Exactly. And if you're a marketer who's been judged on open rate alone, have this conversation with your boss. Show them the Litmus data. Show them the Ourself case study. Because the industry is slowly waking up to this, and the brands that pivot first will have a real advantage. Luna: I'm sold. Next week, I want to talk about something that's also a pet peeve of mine — the 'spray and pray' approach to email frequency. Lucas: Oh, that's a good one. Let's do it.