For about a decade, email open rate was the headline metric in every email marketing dashboard. Open it up, look at the percentage, judge the campaign. Easy.
The trouble is your email open rate has quietly become almost meaningless. The data is unreliable, the number gets inflated by things that aren’t real opens, and treating it as the success metric will steer you in the wrong direction. Here is what’s actually going on, and what to look at instead.
How “open rate” was always measured
An email “open” has never actually meant someone read your email. It means a tiny, invisible tracking pixel embedded in your email loaded in their inbox. If the pixel loaded, the platform counted an open.
That always had problems. Some inboxes block images by default. Some people skim the preview pane without ever “opening” anything. The number was always a rough proxy at best.
The Apple Mail problem
In 2021, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15. Anyone using Apple’s Mail app on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac (which is a lot of people) automatically preloads every email’s images on Apple’s servers, whether the user opens the email or not.
From your platform’s point of view, that pixel loaded. The system counts an open. The user might never have looked at it.
This inflated email open rates across the entire industry. Almost overnight, average open rates jumped from roughly 20% to closer to 35%, not because emails got better, but because Apple’s servers were ghost-opening everything.
If your audience is even slightly Apple-heavy (and in South Africa, most professional audiences are), your reported open rate is meaningfully higher than your actual one.
What this means in practice
Three things:
- Don’t compare your open rates to old benchmarks. The 2019 industry averages are not the 2025 industry averages. The number went up; performance did not.
- Don’t celebrate (or panic about) small open rate movements. A jump from 28% to 32% might just mean a few more Apple users showed up in your list this month.
- Don’t use email open rate as your A/B test winner unless you’re testing subject lines specifically, and even then take it with a pinch of salt.
The metrics that actually matter
If open rate is unreliable, what should you look at instead? It depends on what you’re trying to achieve, but in most cases the answer is one of these:
- Click-through rate (CTR). Did people click a link in your email? This requires an actual human action. It’s much harder to game and much harder to inflate. For most campaigns, this is the real engagement metric.
- Reply rate. If you ask a question in your email and people answer, that’s the strongest signal you can get. Replies tell deliverability filters you’re a real person, not a marketer. They also tell you what your audience actually wants.
- Revenue per email. For e-commerce, this is the only number that really counts. Most platforms (Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Brevo) report it directly if your store is connected.
- Unsubscribe rate. Low and steady is fine. Climbing means you’re emailing too often, off-topic, or both.
- List growth rate. Are net new subscribers outpacing unsubscribes? If yes, your sending is healthy at the macro level even if individual campaigns wobble.
What to do about your email open rate
Don’t ignore it entirely. It’s still useful as a directional signal, especially if you watch it over time rather than per campaign. A sudden, sustained drop usually means a deliverability problem (your emails are landing in spam), which is worth investigating.
But stop treating it as the scoreboard. Look at clicks, replies, and revenue. Those are the numbers that actually correlate with email marketing doing what it’s supposed to do.
An honest baseline
If you want a real-world benchmark to compare against (with the caveats above), well-run lists in 2025 sit roughly here:
- Email open rate: 30-45% (inflated by Apple, take with a pinch of salt)
- Click-through rate: 2-5% (this is the real engagement signal)
- Unsubscribe rate per campaign: under 0.5%
- Reply rate (for emails that invite one): 1-3% is healthy, anything above is exceptional
Use those as rough orientation, not as targets. Your audience and content matter more than any benchmark.
Read next
If your open rates are dropping, the first place to look is your subject lines. Here is what works. And if you’re tempted to send more emails to make up for lower opens, that’s usually the wrong direction. See how often you should actually email.
Need a hand reading your data?
If your reports look healthy but the email isn’t actually doing anything for your business, that is the gap we’re useful for. See our email marketing service, or get in touch.
