Open rates have long been a commonly used metric for email marketers to gauge user engagement, and for good reason! Not only did they give insight into what percentage of a subscriber base is actually opening and viewing the emails being sent to them, but they were also one of the most simple metrics to track.
Sounds great, right?
Well, as the digital marketing landscape shifts to accommodate increasingly stringent privacy regulations and restrictions, the accuracy of these metrics has changed significantly.
Apple’s MPP (or Mail Privacy Protection) feature, announced in June 2021 and implemented in September of that year, was an optional feature included in iOS 15 in which users could opt-in to hide their IP address and open-activity from senders. If enabled, users with the Apple Mail app will have all their emails stored and pre-loaded onto an Apple server, including any tracking pixels in those emails. Because of this, they may be reflected as an “open,” even if the email was never actually engaged with.
This posed a big problem because 93.5% of all email opens on mobile came via Apple Mail from iPhones and iPads as of May 2021 (NiemanLab). As such, many referred to MPP as “the death of the open rate.”
Now that all the dust has settled, was all that commotion really true?
Not entirely. The truth is, open rates have never been a very precise way to track user engagement. Andy Fowler of Nutshell.com explains how using open rates as the be-all and end-all method to determine email success is committing the McNamara Fallacy. In short, only accounting for easily measured metrics — and ignoring those that aren’t easily measured—motivates the pursuit to increase those metrics, regardless of their true impact. It also causes metrics that do more accurately track engagement, like clicks and click-through rates, to become a lower priority.
So while the introduction of Apple’s MPP did inflate open rates by as much as 50%, as seen in Omeda’s “The Impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection — 6 months later,” the fallout was not as severe as many marketers expected. If anything, it forced the industry to consider other KPIs — like click and click-through rates — when measuring engagement.
What now?
Open rates will likely continue to be utilized for years to come, and they certainly continue to convey important information. However, it is becoming increasingly critical for marketers to not get caught up in this easily measurable metric at the detriment of other, more telling metrics. Instead, marketers should rely on measurements like bounce rate, click and click-through rates, and conversion rates in conjunction with open rates to better inform themselves regarding audience engagement.
At Digital Additive, we’re always taking steps to ensure our clients have the clarity they need when it comes to metrics of success. Want to know what that can mean for you? Get in touch with us today.
