I saw an interesting response in the HighLevel Facebook group about email metrics. The first sentence read:
"Open rates have never been reliable, so don't focus on those."
That got me thinking - how do people actually perceive open rates?
The truth is, we need to separate this into two distinct trains of thought:
Conversion rates - focused on actual results, like sales, booked calls, or sign-ups.
Email deliverability - ensuring your emails reach the inbox so they even have a chance to perform.
If we’re looking at conversion rates, the open event can actually be misleading.
Why?
Because it all comes down to how MBPs (Mailbox Providers - Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) handle the emails you send their way.
For example, if your contacts use Apple Mail or have an iCloud address with Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) enabled, you won’t be able to accurately track when they actually opened the email.
Apple MPP: What’s Happening?
When an email is sent to an Apple Mail user with MPP enabled, it gets preloaded through Apple’s proxy servers before the recipient ever opens it.
This prevents an accurate contact profile from being built - You won't know what time they actually opened the email nor will you know their true geolocation.
As a result, any send-time optimization capability of your platform may not be as accurate as you think.
If your email automations rely heavily on opens, they’re likely to break or become highly unreliable.
Let's say you have a campaign that is set to automatically resend an important notification to anyone who hasn’t opened it after two days - Apple Mail users may never receive that follow-up because of how the original message was processed by the proxy servers making it appear they've opened it when in fact they didn't.
What About Gmail & Yahoo?
Other providers like Gmail and Yahoo do similar things, but it's more geared toward user experience than privacy focused. So yes, prefetching is happening...
...but not always.
What's weird here is that while testing from various client accounts watching from my many different gmail inboxes I see something odd. Emails get sent, but no prefetching happens if the email lands in Promotions, but once I open the email there are essentially two opens that get recorded and typically are 30 seconds apart.
This doesn't make any real world sense to me and I've tested the same scenario across 10 different sender accounts.
If the email happens to land in the primary inbox then I'm seeing the prefetch happening on its own almost immediately as it's delivered. My engineering spidey sense is telling me it has to do with mobile, because if an email lands in promotions we don't get a notification on our phones; however, if it lands in primary then our phones light up.
Oh I forgot to mention good ol' Microsoft - Outlook and Hotmail especially. Unlike Gmail and Apple Mail, they seem to retain geolocation data, and there’s no clear evidence of prefetching. They’re always a bit behind the curve, but hey, that’s just Microsoft’s innovation strategy at work.
So, How Does Open Rate Matter for Deliverability?
Well - I can tell you that it absolutely matters!
What I continue to see across the board on most all major MBPs, with exception to ProtonMail and others that block the open pixel, is that if your opens are consistently at or above the 40% (Total Opens) mark then your reputation should be HIGH.
However; if your opens are in the 20's (Total Opens) then chances are that your reputation is heavily impacted. This is why when I load InboxIQ into a customer account and I have a quick glance at the data I almost instantly know what their reputation is.
Most platforms give you unique open rates instead of total, so for clarification here's a table published by ConvertKit that shows what your reputation is based upon your unique open rate. Unique opens will be less than total opens of course, just FYI.
What questions do you have about your open rates? Let me know!
One more thing - this was supposed to be sent out on Sunday, but life happens. I'm sure you'll forgive me, but I'll be back on track for the next one.
-Matt
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