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Email open rates have never been an incredibly accurate metric.
Pixel-based open tracking is suppressed by image caching, image blocks, and email clients that don't render images, such as voice assistants and smart watches.
Furthermore, they swollen The most notorious example of prefetching is Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). MPP attempts to hide real user opens by burying them in a tsunami of automatically generated opens.
As soon as MPP was launched two years ago, there were cries of “Open is dead!” But like the cries of “email is dead,” they should be ignored.
This is doubly true if you're a B2B marketer, as you're likely to have less influence than a B2C marketer.
However, MPP has changed how marketers can and cannot use Open. Understanding those changes begins with understanding…
How to open an ESP report
Part of the confusion about open credibility stems from email service providers (ESPs) not being fully transparent about how MPPs impact open reporting.
To be fair, it was a turbulent time and Apple made changes for everyone. But even months after MPP's release, some ESPs said nothing about his MPP, and even when some eventually did, it was little more than a whisper in a footnote in the app. .
This is why so many marketers in 2022 were publicly bragging about the great job they did in increasing open rates by 50%, 80%, and even 100% or more. They didn't understand that it was a mirage courtesy of Apple, a mirage that wasn't dispelled by ESP.
Currently, ESP handles Apple autostart in one of three ways:
- Reports all opens, including automatic opens. If your open rates skyrocket in 2022, this is what your ESP has done. A very high open rate may look and feel good, but it's difficult to use effectively because it's mostly junk data.
- Report authenticity is only open. If open rates drop in 2022, this is what ESP will do. This is the approach Oracle uses with its Responsys and Eloqua platforms. This means you lose the actual opens that are hidden in all of Apple's auto-opens, but it also means marketers can safely use opens and open rates as they did before his MPP.
- Calculate the adjusted aperture ratio. If open rates remain largely unchanged in 2022, this is what ESP will do. When calculating open rates for campaigns, subscribers generating automatic opens are simply ignored and open rates are calculated based solely on open rates (or similar calculations) generated by non-MPP users. . The advantage of this approach is that historical open rates are still useful, but the disadvantage is that the accuracy of open rates is low, giving rise to the false impression that open rates are reliable for a much larger audience than they actually are. It is possible to give sensation.
If you're not sure which approach your ESP uses, do your research. It also determines whether the ESP can avoid automatic opens from his MPP users and trusted opens from non-MPP users. For example, Oracle is removing auto-opens from Responsys and Eloqua reports, but still allows customers to access subscriber auto-open data on an individual level if they wish.
To calculate your adjusted open rate yourself, you need to know the percentage of your audience that has MPP enabled (those who are generating automatic opens) and the open rate of your non-MPP viewers. You can then estimate the non-MPP open rate for your entire MPP audience. It's not completely accurate, but open rates are as accurate as they've ever been.
If you don't have access to that data and are struggling with high MPP open rates, it's time to establish a new open rate benchmark. MPP adoption peaked over a year ago, and year-over-year open rates should be pretty stable right now. In other words, data now allows you to understand whether your recent campaigns are performing better or worse compared to last year.
4 Ways to Open is still useful
Reliable access to open facilitates all of the following use cases: Even if you only have access to opens, including auto-opens, you can still get value from them.
For the first three use cases, the change in open rate is as noticeable as the actual open rate. Regardless of how the ESP report is opened, you can use these changes to draw conclusions.
1. Understand campaign engagement
Especially if you're a B2B, media, or consumer brand company, not all email campaigns are trying to drive sales. At least some companies, and probably most companies, are looking to drive brand engagement, retention, and lead scoring efforts. Along with clicks and website activity, opens are another important metric for these.
2. Measuring click-to-open rates
Comparing opener and clicker ratios reveals two things:
- How well does the subject line match the content of the email body?
- How effective is body copy in driving clicks?
If your click-to-open rate is lower than usual, first check to make sure your subject line isn't ambiguous or misleading. If it's clear what your subscribers will find when they open your email, the body of your email may not be important.
3. Discovering critical reachability issues
If you're on a blocklist or are suffering from significant deliverability issues with your inbox provider, this will show up in your open rates, especially if you can analyze your open rates by inbox provider. . Unless you're using a deliverability monitoring service, this is probably the best way to be aware of critical deliverability issues.
4. Managing subscriber inactivity
…at least for non-MPP users. Opens are still the best way to certify subscribers as safe to email, so if you have subscribers, use reliable opens to measure subscriber engagement.
If not, you'll need to use email clicks more often. You can also consider the recency and frequency of a subscriber's purchases, web visits, app usage, and other activity when considering whether a subscriber is active.
How has the use of open rates changed?
That said, MPP fundamentally changed some aspects of email marketing that relied on opens.
1. Subject line testing and subject line optimization
Before MPP, open rates were routinely used to determine the success of a subject line and were almost universally used to drive subject recommendation engines. This was unfortunate because most brands don't want their subscribers to simply open their emails. They want to engage on a deeper level, but open rates aren't always very predictable, especially if the subject line is vague or too clever.
Thanks to MPP, subject line optimization engines now incorporate clicks into their algorithms, and marketers now rely heavily on clicks for subject line testing as well.
To me, this is one of the few silver linings of MPP. Without MPP, it becomes much harder for brands to serve their subscribers well and satisfy inbox providers by only sending to their most engaged subscribers.
2. Optimization of transmission time
Just as the subject line optimization engine adjusted its algorithm after MPP, the send time optimization engine did the same. The benefits are similar, as brands not only want to send campaigns when they're likely to launch, but also when subscribers are likely to have time to engage more deeply. A click is a better signal for that.
The downside is that it's a far less click-frequent signal, so the send time optimization engine is slower to react to changes in individual subscriber engagement times. That said, unless you are a high-frequency sender, optimizing send times will give you much better results than using universal send times.
3. Open Trigger Journey
Long a common device among B2B marketers, email journeys where the opening of a previous message triggers the next message are no longer viable. Marketers have a variety of options to drive these journeys, but none of them are good alternatives.
* * *
While MPP definitely makes it harder for email marketers to responsibly manage their programs and serve their subscribers well, openness is alive and well.
Apple introduced Link Tracking Protection (LTP) to Safari, so the next thing you hear is a cry of “No more clicking!” They should also be ignored.
LTP will have a much smaller impact on email marketers than MPP. In fact, LTP will probably have a negligible impact on most email marketers.
More resources on email open rates
How email open rates will drop in iOS 15 and how marketers can prepare
Beyond open rates: 8 metrics for more effective email marketing
How to improve email open rates [Infographic]
