Email Open Rates Are Dead — And Smart Marketers Already Know It
If your email marketing strategy lives or dies by open rates, you’re flying blind — and you probably have been since September 2021. The uncomfortable truth that too many brands are still tiptoeing around: open rates are no longer a reliable metric, and doubling down on them is actively hurting your marketing decisions. This isn’t a hot take for clicks. It’s a fundamental shift in how email performance must be measured, and the brands winning in the inbox right now have already made the switch.
What Killed the Open Rate?
The death blow came from Apple. With the rollout of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in iOS 15, Apple began pre-loading email content — including tracking pixels — on its servers before a user ever actually opened a message. The result? Emails are recorded as “opened” whether a real human ever laid eyes on them or not.
The scale of this problem is enormous. Apple Mail consistently accounts for 40–55% of all email opens across industries. That means a massive chunk of your open rate data is now fabricated — artificial signals generated by Apple’s servers, not your subscribers’ actual behavior.
“After Apple MPP, some brands saw their open rates spike 30–40% overnight — not because engagement improved, but because machines were pinging their tracking pixels. Marketers who celebrated that lift made every strategy decision that followed on bad data.”
Google, Yahoo, and other providers have made similar moves toward user privacy. The trajectory is clear. Open rates as a primary KPI are not coming back.
So What Metrics Should Email Marketers Track Instead?
This is the right question — and it has clear, actionable answers. Shifting away from open rates doesn’t mean flying blind; it means tracking signals that actually correlate with revenue and subscriber health.
1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Clicks require a real human to make a deliberate choice. Click-through rate measures the percentage of delivered emails that generated at least one click. It reflects genuine interest and intent in a way that open rates simply cannot anymore. Track CTR by campaign, by audience segment, and over time to identify what content actually drives action.
2. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)
CTOR — clicks divided by opens — is a useful secondary metric because it isolates how well your email content converts among people who engaged with it. While raw open counts are polluted, CTOR can still reveal whether your subject line and body copy are working in concert.
3. Revenue Per Email (RPE)
If you’re doing e-commerce or any direct-response email marketing, revenue per email is one of the most powerful metrics in your arsenal. It cuts through vanity metrics entirely and connects your email program directly to business outcomes. Divide total email-attributed revenue by the number of emails sent. Watch it trend over time.
4. Conversion Rate
Whether your goal is a purchase, a form fill, a booked call, or a download — conversion rate is what matters. Connect your email platform to your analytics stack (Google Analytics 4, your CRM, or your e-commerce platform) and track what subscribers actually do after they click.
5. List Health Metrics: Bounces, Unsubscribes, and Spam Complaints
These defensive metrics tell you whether your email program is sustainable. High bounce rates hurt your sender reputation. Elevated spam complaints can get you blacklisted. Sudden unsubscribe spikes signal content or frequency problems. A healthy list is a revenue-generating list — don’t neglect the hygiene side of email marketing.
What About Deliverability?
Here’s where many brands miss the bigger picture. The obsession with open rates often distracts from email deliverability — the foundational question of whether your emails are even reaching the inbox in the first place. Inbox placement rates, sender reputation scores, domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and engagement-based filtering all directly impact how many subscribers have the opportunity to act on your campaigns.
You can have the most compelling subject line in the world, but if Gmail is routing your emails to the Promotions tab or the spam folder, it doesn’t matter. The email marketing strategists at Rainboots Marketing consistently find that deliverability improvements — not creative tweaks — produce the biggest lifts in email-driven revenue for new clients.
How to Rebuild Your Email Strategy Around Real Signals
Migrating away from open-rate obsession isn’t just about swapping out one dashboard metric for another. It requires a strategic rethinking of how you segment, test, and optimize your email program.
- Segment by engagement behavior: Use clicks, purchases, and site visits to define active vs. disengaged subscribers — not opens. This protects deliverability and ensures your best content reaches your warmest audience.
- A/B test based on downstream metrics: Test subject lines, but measure success by CTR and conversions — not which variant got more “opens.” You’ll get faster and more truthful data.
- Sunset unengaged subscribers deliberately: Build a re-engagement flow based on click and purchase activity. Subscribers who haven’t clicked or bought in 90–180 days should move into a sunset sequence, not just continue receiving your full campaign volume.
- Invest in zero-party data: Ask subscribers directly what they want through preference centers, surveys, and onboarding questionnaires. The more relevant your emails, the better your real engagement metrics will be.
- Audit your attribution model: Make sure your ESP, CRM, and analytics platform agree on what counts as email-attributed revenue. Alignment here is critical to making smart budget decisions.
What Does a High-Performing Email Program Look Like in 2025?
The brands winning at email right now share a few common characteristics. They have clean, permission-based lists built through ethical acquisition tactics. Their automation flows — welcome series, post-purchase sequences, browse and cart abandonment — are dialed in and generating revenue on autopilot. They test relentlessly, but they test the right things against the right outcomes. And they treat email as a relationship channel, not a broadcast channel.
They also have expert support. The digital marketing team at Rainboots Marketing in Seattle works with brands across industries to build email programs that are grounded in real performance data — not metrics that Apple’s servers inflated three years ago.
The Bottom Line
Open rates aren’t completely useless — they can still hint at relative shifts in subject line performance when you account for MPP distortion. But as a primary KPI, as a health indicator, or as the basis for strategic decisions, email open rates are dead. The marketers who accept this — and pivot to click-through rates, revenue per email, conversion rates, and deliverability signals — are the ones building email programs that actually grow businesses.
The good news: this is a forcing function toward better marketing. Vanity metrics never built a brand. Real engagement, real revenue, and a real relationship with your audience always will.
