Email opens have never been an incredibly accurate metric.
Tracking pixel-based opens is deflated by image caching, image blocking, and email clients that don't render images, such as voice assistants and smart watches.
Moreover, they're inflated by pre-fetching—most notoriously by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which seeks to obscure real user opens by burying them in a tsunami of auto-generated opens.
The launch of MPP two years ago immediately led to cries of "Opens are dead!" But much like the cries of "Email is dead," they should be ignored.
That is doubly true if you're a B2B marketer, because you're likely to be less affected than your B2C counterparts.
However, MPP has changed how marketers can and can't use opens. Understanding those changes starts with understanding...
How Your ESP Reports Opens
Some of the confusion around the reliability of opens is a result of email service providers' (ESPs) not being transparent enough about how MPP has affected their open reporting.
To be fair, it was a confusing time, and Apple sprung the change on everyone. However, many months after the launch of MPP, some ESPs hadn't said anything about MPP—and when some eventually did, it was a whisper in footnotes in their apps.
That's why so many marketers in 2022 were publicly bragging about the great job they'd done increasing their open rates by 50%, 80%, or even 100% or more! They didn't understand it was a mirage courtesy of Apple—a mirage that wasn't dispelled by their ESP.
Today, ESPs handle Apple auto opens in one of three ways:
- Reporting all opens, including auto opens. If your open rates soared in 2022, this is what your ESP did. A sky high open rate may look and feel good, but it's mostly junk data, which makes it difficult to use effectively.
- Reporting reliable opens only. If your open rates declined in 2022, this is what your ESP did. It's the approach that we at Oracle use with our Responsys and Eloqua platforms. Although it means losing the real opens that are obscured in all of Apple's auto opens, it means marketers can use their opens and open rates safely, and in all the ways they did pre-MPP.
- Calculating an adjusted open rate. If your open rates were largely unchanged in 2022, this is what your ESP did. When calculating the open rates for your campaigns, it simply ignored your subscribers who were generating auto opens, basing the open rate solely on the open rate generated by your non-MPP users (or similar calculations). The upside of this approach is that your historical open rates remain useful, but the downside is that the rate is less accurate and can give you the false sense that you have reliable opens for way more of your audience than you actually do.
If you're unsure which approach your ESP is using, do some investigating. Also, determine whether your ESP makes it possible to break out auto opens from MPP users and reliable opens from non-MPP users. For example, Oracle strips out auto open from our reporting in Responsys and Eloqua, but we allow customers to access auto open data for their subscribers on an individual level, should they want to.
To calculate an adjusted open rate yourself, you just need to know the percentage of your audience that's enabled MPP (they're the ones generating auto opens) and the open rate among your non-MPP audience. Then you can extrapolate your non-MPP open rate across your MPP audience. It won't be perfectly accurate, but open rates never have been.
If you don't have access to that data and you're stuck with inflated MPP open rates, then it's time to establish new open rate benchmarks. MPP adoption peaked more than a year ago, so year-over-year open rates should be quite stable now. That means the data now allows you to understand whether your recent campaigns are doing better or worse compared with last year.
Four Ways Opens Are Still Useful
Access to reliable opens makes all of the following use cases easier. Even if you have access only to opens that include auto opens, you can still get value out of them.
With the first three use cases, changes in your open rates can be just as telling as what your open rate actually is. Regardless of how your ESP reports opens, you'll be able to use those changes to draw conclusions.
1. Understanding Campaign Engagement
Especially if you're a B2B, media, or consumer brand company, all of your email campaigns aren't trying to drive sales. At least some—perhaps even most—are trying to drive brand engagement, retention, or lead-scoring efforts. Along with clicks and website activity, opens are a key measure of those.
2. Measuring Click-to-Open Rates
Comparing the ratio of openers to clickers allows you to understand two things:
- How aligned your subject line is with the body content of your email
- How effective your body copy is at driving clicks