Beyond Open Rate: The Future of Email Marketing Metrics

If you believed that open rates were the foolproof gauge of how engaged your email recipients are with your messages, it's time to reconsider! In 2023, we're waving goodbye to open rates as one of the core performance metrics in email marketing and exploring alternative options.

This shift is prompted by Apple's recent updates, including iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. Among these updates is a significant feature designed to safeguard Apple users' data from third-party applications.

Within the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has been introduced to block senders from surreptitiously gathering user information using invisible tracking pixels. This new feature empowers users to keep their email opening activities private, shielding their IP addresses from being linked to other online behaviors or used to determine their location.

Source: Apple

Traditionally, email tracking software relies on these tracking pixels to record open rates when users access their emails. However, Apple's recent changes entail preloading all email content, including these tracking pixels. As a result, an email may appear as "opened" even if the user never actually engaged with it.

"Most users (66%) open emails on mobile devices, with 58% of them using Apple devices."

Source: Martech

Email marketers now face a pivotal decision. They can seek alternative key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure engagement, continue tracking open rates for Android and PC users, and adopt different metrics for Apple users. Alternatively, they can track open rates across the board but acknowledge a potentially wider margin of error.