You may already know that you have to take email marketing open rates with a pinch of salt, but did you know the open rates in your reports can be higher than the actual number of opens, as well as lower?
The open rate as given by your email marketing platform reports has never been 100% accurate, because it relied on a tiny, invisible image file (tracking pixel) being viewed when the email was opened by the subscriber to record the email as opened. If the subscriber read a preview of the email or had set their email software to not download images at all, then the email wouldn’t show as opened in the sender’s reports. So for a long time, you could pretty much assume that your opens were a bit higher than the stats said they were.
Not any more.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) now prevents email marketers from seeing whether Apple users have opened their emails or not. Apple users can opt out of this, but it’s estimated that it applies to around 97% of Apple users. In fact, this is one small aspect of MPP which stops link tracking, too (there’s detail here from Dot Digital). You might think this would mean your open rates would drop as the Apple users disappear from your reports, but the opposite happens as Apple’s servers automatically open all emails – triggering the tracking pixel – whether the user opens or not.
Last week I saw this in action when I was looking through a client’s data in Mailerlite. At first glance, it looks like he has great open rates but when I dug into the history of some individual subscribers I saw over and over again that their emails had been opened a minute or two after they had been sent. Even the most dedicated subscriber won’t be watching their inbox at the right time every single week, waiting for a newsletter to arrive, and be able to open it a minute later every time. In other words, this email isn’t being opened by a human.
In some cases I could see the email was opened again up to 24 hours later, suggesting the human had got around to reading it by that point.
Apple aren’t the only ones responsible for the inflated open rate, sadly. Security software can open emails and maybe click some of the links inside to protect the inbox owner from e.g. phishing emails.
All this means that you need another way of measuring the success of your campaigns. There’s no simple way to do this, but the best place to start is to look at the bigger picture. What are your goals for your email marketing? If these are sales goals, then you need to look at your sales data – these may be on your website or elsewhere – then find out what proportion of those sales can be attributed to which campaign or channel.
A customer might see some social posts, then a couple of emails, then have a chat with you before finally making the purchase. So it’s not that easy to work this out. But widening your sources of data and then interpreting them using what you know about your business and clients’ behaviour is going to give you a much better picture than open rates alone.
For other goals, see what data you are collecting and make use of that to see your bigger picture, for example sign-ups to events, content downloads or social media stats.
Some platforms can tell which interactions are ‘non human’, allowing for more accurate reports, and I hope this will increase over time. But with increasing privacy legislation and more awareness of data privacy in general, it’s likely that data will only get harder to interpret in future.
If you’d like me to dig through your Mailerlite account and tell you things you might not have spotted yet that could improve your engagement and sales, just let me know. And if you don’t currently track your email data or link it to your business goals, there’s a good introduction to this in my Email Marketing for Indie Businesses guide.