Email Open Rates Are Lying to You (Apple Mail Privacy Edition)
Open rates have been broken since 2021. Here is what to optimize for instead.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection (launched 2021) inflates open rates by automatically pre-fetching tracking pixels for a large share of email opens. The reported open rate is no longer correlated to actual reads. Most marketing teams still use open rate as a primary email metric. They are optimizing against noise.
What to optimize against instead: click-through rate (still reliable), reply rate (the highest-quality engagement signal), unsubscribe rate (still reliable inverse signal), and downstream pipeline behavior (did this email send influence a meeting booking, an opportunity creation, an account engagement spike).
The shift in mindset: stop A/B testing subject lines for open rate (the test results are noise). Start A/B testing subject lines for click-through rate (uses opens but only the real ones who clicked). Better: test subject lines for reply rate on outbound and click-through rate on nurture.
If your reporting still leads with open rate, lead with click-through rate instead in the next board deck. The credibility gain (showing that you understand the data ecosystem) is worth more than the comfortable familiarity of the old metric. Reps and execs who have read about Apple Mail Privacy in the last three years will respect the upgrade.