Explain how privacy features push open rates up, and say what to check instead.
Many people judge an email by its open rate. They send a newsletter, check the report, and treat the open figure as the share of subscribers who read it. That figure is now hard to trust. Some of the opens it records were made by software, and some real readers never appear in it, so a weak email can look strong. For years open rate was the first number every email marketer checked. Now it is the least reliable number in the report.
An email has no way of telling the sender that someone read it, so email tools rely on a workaround called a tracking pixel. This is a tiny image nobody can see, made for one particular email and one particular recipient, and stored on the email tool's server. If the email is shown with images turned on, the reader's email app requests that image from the server, and the tool logs the request as an open.
An open has always meant that the image was downloaded. Whether anyone read the words was never part of the measurement. For many years the two matched closely enough for open rate to be a useful guide. Since then, two things have separated them. One adds opens and the other removes them.
Apple's Mail app has a setting called Apple Mail Privacy Protection. When it is on, Apple's servers download the images in each incoming email in the background, whether or not the person ever opens the message. The tracking pixel is one of those images, so the email tool logs an open. For subscribers who read mail in Apple Mail with the setting on, many emails get counted as opened even when nobody looked at them. The time stamp on these opens can't be trusted either, because it records when Apple collected the images and says nothing about when the person read the email.
People use Apple Mail on iPhones, iPads and Macs, and on many lists a large share of subscribers read their email there. If many of your customers use iPhones, a meaningful part of your open rate may be machine opens: opens logged because a privacy feature fetched the images, with no person opening the email. Your email tool's reports may break your list down by email app. That breakdown shows how strongly Apple's feature affects your numbers.
Mei Ling runs a business and sends a newsletter to customers, many of whom use iPhones. The report for her latest issue pleases her, because the open rate is her highest ever. When she checks that week's orders, she finds fewer than usual. Clicks on the order link look about the same as in every other month. She can't tell whether people read the email, and the open rate gives her no way to find out. The cause was that more of her subscribers had Apple Mail Privacy Protection switched on, so their copies were marked as opened automatically. Her open rate climbed and her orders did not.
Blocked images cause the reverse problem. Some email apps and settings hold back images until the reader decides to load them. Some readers keep images off on purpose, to save mobile data or for privacy. With images blocked, the tracking pixel is never fetched. Someone can open the email, read all of it and even click a link, and the tool may log no open. Most tools treat anyone who clicks as having opened, which covers part of that gap. A reader with images blocked who reads without clicking stays invisible in the open count.
So machine opens inflate the open rate and blocked images deflate it, by amounts nobody can measure precisely. Open rate no longer tells you how many people read an email.
It does keep a limited use. If your list and its mix of email apps stay roughly the same, a sudden large fall in opens from one month to the next can be an early warning. One possible cause is a delivery problem, where your mail has started going to spam. Use open rate as a rough trend at most, and investigate any sudden large drop.
To decide whether an email worked, set the open rate aside and look at actions only a person can take:
Clicks first, since Apple's privacy feature never clicks links on anyone's behalf. Replies next, particularly when the email asked a question. Priya's welcome email, which asks which topic a child finds hardest, is the kind of email where replies are a good measure. Bookings, orders and enquiries traced back to the email. Lesson 8.2, "The numbers that link email to money", covers how to trace them.
This is the reasoning behind two earlier instructions. Lesson 5.2 had you test subject lines on clicks instead of opens. Lesson 3.4 had you decide which subscribers are quiet using clicks, replies and purchases instead of opens, because a subscriber whose Apple Mail opens everything automatically never looks quiet by opens, even after a year of reading nothing.
Email tools handle this differently. Some now try to identify machine opens and either list them separately or leave them out of the open rate by default. Some report all opens together, and some let you choose. The wording varies as well. You may see machine opens, privacy opens or Apple opens, or only a note in the report's help text. Knowing which approach your tool takes tells you how much weight its open rate deserves.
In the activity below you will open your email tool's report for your last send and check whether it separates machine or privacy opens from other opens. If the reports also show how your list splits by email app, look at that too. Then decide how much weight to give the open rate when you judge your emails.
Open your email tool's report for your last send and note whether it lists machine or privacy opens separately from other opens.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).