What is Open rate?
Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that registered an open, usually measured by a tiny tracking image loading.
Since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021, many Apple Mail opens are registered automatically whether or not a person looked at the email. That inflates open rates and makes them noisy.
Use open rate only as a rough diagnostic, for example to compare two subject lines sent to similar audiences. Judge real performance by clicks, revenue per recipient and attributed revenue.
A worked example.
Two subject lines are tested on equal halves of an audience. One shows a higher open rate, but clicks and revenue are the same. The team keeps both and learns the open difference came partly from automatic Apple opens, not real interest.
Common mistakes.
- Reporting open rate as the headline result
- Comparing open rate before and after 2021 as if it meant the same thing
- Optimising subject lines on opens alone
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