Why a 20% email open rate no longer tells you very much
For years, the email open rate has been the metric that newsletter senders obsessed over. Twenty per cent was respectable. Thirty per cent was rather good. Anything above forty and you were presumably sending emails exclusively to your immediate family.
Except now, none of that really means what it used to. Open rates have become about as reliable as a weather forecast for next month—they might be accurate, they might be wildly optimistic, or they might be reflecting something that never actually happened.
What actually counts as an "open" these days
The traditional way of tracking whether someone opened your email is reassuringly simple: you embed a tiny, invisible image (a tracking pixel) in the message. When someone opens the email, their email client downloads that image, and bingo—you've registered an open.
This worked tolerably well for years. It wasn't perfect—people who disabled images didn't get counted, for instance—but it gave you a reasonable sense of who was reading your newsletters and who was ignoring them with admirable consistency.
Then privacy features arrived and made a bit of a mess of things.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection and the inflation problem
When Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection, it did something rather inconvenient for people who like their metrics tidy: it started preloading tracking pixels whether the recipient actually opened the email or not. The feature downloads all the images in an email automatically, often before you've even glanced at it, sometimes whilst you're asleep and your phone is charging.
From a privacy standpoint, this is excellent. From a metrics standpoint, it's like trying to count how many people attended your party when half the RSVPs are being submitted by an automated system that says "yes" regardless of whether anyone actually showed up.
The result? Open rates that would have made you feel rather pleased with yourself a few years ago are now... well, they might be real, or they might be inflated by Apple's servers politely downloading your tracking pixel whilst the actual human recipient hasn't given your email a moment's thought. Some newsletter senders saw their open rates jump from something like 28% to 55% overnight—not because their subject lines suddenly became irresistible, but because Apple's privacy features started registering "opens" that never really happened.
When the headline percentage becomes meaningless
The trouble with all this is that open rates were never meant to be scrutinised in isolation. They vary enormously depending on who you're sending to and what you're sending about. A newsletter going to people who specifically asked for weekly updates about a topic they care about will naturally perform differently from a monthly roundup sent to everyone who once downloaded a white paper.
But we do like a single, neat percentage to obsess over, don't we? It's measurable. It goes in reports. You can track it over time and pretend you understand what's happening.
The problem is that a 20% open rate might now mean:
Twenty per cent of recipients genuinely opened and read your email
Five per cent opened it, and Apple's privacy features accounted for the rest
Forty per cent opened it, but most of them have images disabled
Some combination of the above that changes week to week depending on the composition of your list
When a metric can mean almost anything, it doesn't really mean very much at all.
What actually tells you if your newsletter is working
The slightly annoying truth is that measuring email performance properly now requires you to look at several things rather than one tidy percentage. It's more work, and you can't reduce it to a single number that fits nicely in a PowerPoint slide, but it does have the advantage of actually telling you something useful.
Clicks are harder to fake. If someone clicks a link in your email, they've made a deliberate choice to engage with your content. They're not just passively allowing an image to load—they've actively done something. Track which links get clicked, how many people click through, and what they do when they arrive. This tells you far more about whether your email was worthwhile than whether a tracking pixel loaded.
Replies are even better. If someone takes the time to hit reply and type something back to you, your email has done its job rather well. This is particularly telling for newsletters that aim to start conversations rather than just broadcast information.
Useful actions matter most of all. Did people download the thing you mentioned? Book the appointment you offered? Buy the product you featured? Make the donation you requested? These are the metrics that actually connect to your goals, whatever those might be.
The problem with messier metrics
None of this is as simple as glancing at your open rate and deciding whether to feel pleased or disappointed. Tracking actions requires you to think about what you're actually trying to achieve with each email, then measure whether you achieved it. Different emails will have different goals, which means different metrics matter at different times.
It's less tidy, certainly. But it's considerably more honest about whether your newsletter is earning its keep.
What to do instead of obsessing over opens
If you're still tracking open rates—and most email platforms will continue to report them whether they're reliable or not—treat them as one data point among several rather than the definitive measure of success. Watch for sudden changes that might indicate technical issues or list quality problems, but don't assume that a good-looking open rate means your emails are actually being read with interest.
Focus instead on engagement that requires conscious action: clicks, replies, conversions, whatever matters for your particular newsletter. Ask yourself whether people are doing the things you hoped they'd do after reading your email. If they are, your newsletter is working, regardless of what the open rate claims.
And perhaps most importantly, think about whether the emails you're sending are worth opening in the first place. No amount of metric-juggling will fix a newsletter that people don't actually want to receive.
More where this came from
If you found this article useful, we've written quite a bit more about marketing—the practical stuff that actually helps rather than the sort of advice that sounds impressive but tells you nothing. Have a look through the Marketing section and you'll find plenty to disagree with or, occasionally, find helpful.
The Three-Option Trick: Letting Your Pricing Do the Selling For You
The "First Date" Rule: Don’t Propose to Your Customers Too Fast
Why your marketing probably shouldn't be on TikTok (even though everyone says it should)
Why we write about this sort of thing
We write about marketing because it's part of what we do when we build websites. Getting the technical bits right is important, obviously, but a website that nobody visits or that doesn't persuade anyone to do anything useful is just expensive decoration. So when we build your website, we think about how it fits into your actual marketing efforts, how people will find it, and what they'll do when they arrive.
We also offer an ongoing management service where we take care of things for clients who'd rather not think about hosting, updates, security patches, and all the other things that websites require to keep working properly. It's the same approach: practical help with the bits that matter, delivered without fuss.
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If you'd like us to build you a website—or take care of the one you've already got—get in touch. We'll have a proper conversation about what you actually need rather than what we'd like to sell you, which tends to work out better for everyone involved.
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Why did my email open rate suddenly jump overnight?
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection likely caused it. This feature automatically downloads tracking pixels before you've even opened the email, registering as an 'open' even if no one actually read it. Some senders saw their rates jump from 28% to 55% overnight without any real change in engagement.
What email metric should I track instead of open rates?
Focus on clicks, replies, and actual conversions. Clicks show someone deliberately engaged with your content, replies indicate genuine interest, and conversions (downloads, bookings, purchases) tell you if your email achieved its actual goal. These are much harder to fake than open rates.
Is a 20% email open rate still good?
It depends, and honestly, it doesn't tell you much anymore. That 20% could mean genuine opens, Apple's privacy features inflating the number, or a mix of both. Without looking at clicks and actual engagement, the open rate percentage has become pretty unreliable.