A Farewell to the Open Rate

Andy Fowler CEO & Co-Founder, Nutshell Last updated on: January 26, 2026

Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection feature eliminates the ability for email marketers to measure opens. iOS Mail currently makes up 40% of email client market share. Add MacOS Mail to that, and half of email clients will soon be hiding open data.

But here’s the dirty secret: the accuracy of the open rate has been shaky and in decline for a few years now. Many corporate email security products block this information, as do privacy-centric email apps like HEY. Gmail’s image proxying has led marketers to create imprecise workarounds for measurement.

There’s even an entire mini-site devoted to tracking the death of the open rate.

So this fall, when half of email clients make open tracking impossible, it’s the nail in the coffin for this metric. 

And you know what? The retirement of the open rate is a good thing for marketers, small businesses, and privacy advocates alike.

I’m the co-founder of an email marketing company, and I’ll confess: we offer reporting on campaign open rates. At the top of the page. In bold text. 28 pixels tall! We all want to know if our audiences read what we have to say.

So what’s wrong with the open rate?

Let’s start with the word “open.” Sounds like you’re walking to the mailbox and tearing open an envelope. But think about how you read email: one swipe of your phone and you’re glancing at them in line at Chipotle or during all-hands Zoom calls. Or maybe you tear through your inbox with the Outlook preview pane.

If an email graces your screen—even momentarily—the marketer who emailed it declares victory and marks you down as an open.

The data behind open rate decline

The case against open rates isn’t just theoretical—it’s backed by hard data. In September 2021, when Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) first launched, the impact was immediate. Within a single week, MPP accounted for 5% of all email opens tracked. More telling: unique open counts jumped 6.5%—nearly double the largest weekly increase systems had observed in the prior six months.

That’s the problem in a nutshell: open rates became inflated, not because emails were actually opened more, but because machine opens replaced human opens.

Fast forward to 2025, and the impact has only grown. Across email clients, Apple Mail addresses (icloud.com, me.com, mac.com) show significantly higher MPP adoption than Gmail or Outlook, meaning data fragmentation is a real issue. One report found that traditional open counts peak between 6:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. PST, but MPP-generated opens peak between 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. PST—a completely different pattern that makes send-time optimization nearly impossible.

The bottom line: If you’re making strategic decisions based on open rates, you’re working with a metric that’s increasingly disconnected from actual engagement. No wonder email ROI analysis became so muddy for marketing teams relying solely on this metric.

Faux accuracy

Open rates sound so darned precise! Ask a sales pro about next month’s pipeline and they’ll say “about $100,000, give or take.” That’s not because they lost their brain cells on TikTok—but because they know those figures contain a lot of uncertainty.

Open rates are percentages of large numbers, so we tack on a bunch of decimal places which suggest accuracy as well as precision. Take a look at these open rate benchmarks from Mailchimp. If you’re a food truck with a 22.87% open rate, are you really 0.44% behind the pack? 

The precision of open rates obscures all the things we don’t know.

Metrics comparison: What actually works for measuring campaign performance

Key insight: The most successful email teams track multiple metrics together. Open rate by itself tells you nothing; reply rate + click rate + revenue per email tells you everything.

Open rate is a distraction

But the real problem with open rate is this: It’s a distraction from outcomes that really matter. Email campaigns aren’t advertising. We don’t measure them by the impression.

The McNamara fallacy warns against only measuring the easily-measured things, and the story goes like this:

• Measure the things that are easy to measure (that’s open rate: it’s the big number at the top of your email marketing software!)
• Disregard the things which aren’t easily measured (How many leads did this campaign generate? How did it help sales bring leads to a webcast? How much revenue did it support?)
• Spend all your time fiddling with #1, eking out a higher open rate with sneaky subject lines and maybe some emojis.
• Nothing else happens.
• Marketing earns an arts-and-crafts reputation, with no connection to sales.

If we are to be marketers who truly care about sales and growth outcomes, then open rates no longer deserve a place in a marketer’s toolbox—not when more than half of your readers are ignored.

Real-world data: When high CTR doesn’t mean high revenue

Here’s a real-world example that illustrates why chasing open rates—and even CTR alone—can lead you astray.

An ecommerce team ran A/B tests on their holiday email campaign in Q4 2021. Test Version A had the highest click-through rate: a 44% boost over the control. By traditional metrics, it should have been the winner.

But when the team looked at Revenue Per Thousand Emails (RPME), the picture flipped entirely.

• Control: $12.04 RPME
• Test Version A (highest CTR): $122.57 RPME (565% lift)
• Test Version B (lower CTR): $122.57 RPME — 918% lift (10x the control)

Wait—how did Test Version B win with a lower click-through rate? Because while fewer people clicked, the people who did clicked on higher-value offers. Test Version B had an average order value (AOV) of $1,019.37 compared to the control’s $146.11. That 588% AOV difference more than made up for the lower transaction volume.

Across 14 total tests in that campaign, if the team had used CTR alone as their KPI, they would have been wrong 36% of the time and inconclusive 57% of the time. Only 7% of the time would CTR correctly predict the highest-revenue version.

The lesson: Email metrics only tell you part of the story. Revenue per email sent—your actual business metric—tells you the whole story.

Open rate alternatives: What to measure instead

So how do we measure our email marketing efforts? I’ll start with one that seems to often be forgotten:

Measure replies

Email isn’t advertising: it’s communication. So why not ask your audience what they’re thinking? What problem are they trying to solve this week? I bet they’ll tell you!

Why reply rate beats open rate: Unlike open rates, which are generated by mail clients, previews, and automated systems, replies are genuine human engagement. When someone takes 30 seconds to respond to your email, they’re signaling that your message resonated enough to warrant a response.

The data backs this up. Cold email campaigns with no personalization see reply rates around 1-4%. But campaigns with personalization see 5-9% reply rates—and top performers who combine tight segmentation, specific value propositions, and clear calls-to-action can hit 15% or higher.

Here’s what high-performing cold email looks like:

Generic CTA: “Are you available for a call?” Result: 5.2% response rate

Specific CTA: “Worth a 15-minute screen share next Tuesday or Thursday?” Result: 18.4% response rate

The difference? The winning CTA:

• Specifies time commitment (15 minutes, not vague “a call”)
• Offers concrete options (Tuesday or Thursday)
• Delivers tangible value upfront (screen share, not generic meeting)
• Removes friction (recipient can say yes immediately)

My favorite part of being the sender on the occasional Nutshell campaign is the dose of questions, feedback, rants, and praise that appears in my inbox. Your audience has something to say, and it might be more valuable to your business than a 1.127% increase in open rate.

Even better: When people reply to your emails, it sends signals to email providers about the quality of your messages, which improves your future deliverability. Replies literally make your next campaign more likely to reach the inbox.

Measure clicks and actions

Did your campaign generate RSVPs to next week’s webcast? Did it bring attendees to that webcast? Did it book qualified meetings with the right stakeholders? While those metrics don’t show up at the top of MailChimp or Constant Contact, they’re much more important to your business than open rate.

Click-through rate (CTR) is more reliable than open rate because it measures actual user behavior—clicking a link is a deliberate action, not an automated system reading a pixel. Your email platform can track every click with reasonable accuracy.

But CTR is still just a proxy. The real question is: where did those clicks lead, and what happened after?

Strong email campaigns connect clicks to outcomes:

• Link clicks → Website visits: Track which pages people landed on using UTM parameters (example: ?utm_campaign=holiday-promo-2025)
• Website visits → Form submissions: Did they download a resource? Request a demo? Sign up?
• Form submissions → Pipeline: Are they qualified leads? Do they match your ideal customer profile?
• Pipeline → Revenue: Did they become customers?

This is where CRM integration becomes critical. When you connect email metrics to your CRM, you can see which campaigns actually moved deals forward.

Measure revenue

How many of your new customers engaged with your marketing content? How many of your email clicks turned into paying customers? Those outcomes are what we should be using as our north star.

Your email revenue metric might be:

• Revenue per email sent: Total revenue ÷ number of emails sent
• Revenue per click: Total revenue ÷ number of clicks
• Cost per acquisition via email: Email program cost ÷ new customers
• Email attribution revenue: Revenue from customers who clicked an email in their journey

The beauty of revenue metrics is they force alignment between marketing and sales. When both teams are focused on revenue—not vanity metrics—something remarkable happens: you naturally optimize for the right audience.

For example, one ecommerce company noticed they were sending 70% fewer campaigns but generating 50% more revenue. How? They stopped blasting everyone and started targeting their most engaged customers by recency. They used AI-powered segmentation to identify customers most likely to purchase based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and engagement patterns.

Result: fewer emails sent, higher revenue generated, better deliverability (because engagement rates improved), and happier customers (fewer unwanted emails).

How CRM integration transforms email metrics

Here’s the missing piece most marketing teams don’t talk about: You can’t make smart decisions about email metrics if they’re siloed in your email platform.

When email metrics live in MailChimp, revenue lives in Salesforce, and customer data lives in HubSpot, each system tells an incomplete story. You can’t see which email campaigns actually moved deals. You can’t identify which customer segments are most valuable. You can’t track attribution across the full customer journey.

But when your email platform integrates with your CRM, everything changes.

What a CRM-integrated email view looks like:

• Reply tracked automatically: When a prospect replies to your email, it creates an activity record on their contact profile
• Clicks mapped to pipeline: You see which email campaigns generated clicks, and which of those clicks came from opportunities in your pipeline
• Engagement tied to deal progress: You know which prospects opened your nurture sequence before moving to “proposal” stage
• Revenue attribution: You can see that the September promotional email campaign was opened by 3 customers who became deal closures, representing $47,500 in revenue
• Predictive insights: AI analyzes which email characteristics (send time, personalization, offer type) correlated with won deals, so you can optimize future campaigns

This is where email marketing stops being an art and becomes a science.

CRM platforms like Nutshell are built specifically for this. They combine email metrics, sales pipeline visibility, and revenue tracking in one place. Instead of jumping between tools to understand a single customer’s journey, you see everything in one contact record: every email opened, every link clicked, every meeting booked, every deal won.

The result: Sales and marketing teams speaking the same language (revenue), not arguing about metrics (open rates).

Need a user-friendly CRM to boost sales and team efficiency?

Take our guided tour to explore Nutshell’s incredible features!

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The shift to privacy-first email marketing

One reason open rates have become less reliable isn’t just technology—it’s regulation. Privacy laws like GDPR (Europe), CCPA/CPRA (California), CASL (Canada), and LGPD (Brazil) are fundamentally changing how email works.

These regulations enforce permission-based marketing, require clear unsubscribe options, and penalize poor list hygiene. The side effect? Email teams that were blasting massive lists and relying on high volume are now forced to focus on quality.

And you know what? That’s actually good for metrics.

When you’re limited by privacy regulations to sending only to people who truly opted in, your engagement rates naturally improve. Your reply rates go up. Your conversion rates improve. Your sender reputation strengthens. Your deliverability improves.

This is the paradox of privacy-first email: By sending fewer emails to fewer people, you get better results.

Gmail and Microsoft reinforced this shift in 2024 by introducing stricter authentication requirements (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and penalizing senders with high spam complaint rates or low engagement. They’re essentially saying: “Prove your email is legitimate, and prove people actually want it. If not, we’re sending you to spam.”

The teams thriving in this environment aren’t the ones trying to maximize open rates. They’re the ones focused on:

• Tight list segmentation: Sending the right message to the right person at the right time
• Personalization at scale: Using AI to craft messages relevant to each recipient
• Engagement quality over volume: Fewer emails with higher value
• Revenue tracking: Measuring what actually matters

This is why moving beyond open rates isn’t just a nice idea—it’s a necessity for sustainable email success.

Ready to move beyond open rates?

The email marketing landscape is changing. Privacy regulations are tightening. Search engines and AI systems are demanding better structured data. And teams are finally realizing that open rates were always a distraction.

The good news? Better metrics are already here. Reply rates. Click-to-action metrics. Revenue per email. Replies. All of these give you clear visibility into what actually matters: Does this email move my business forward?

The transition starts with one step: Connect your email marketing to your CRM. When you do, you can stop guessing about email performance and start measuring it.

Try Nutshell free for 14 days and see how integrated email metrics transform your email strategy from an art into a science.

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