Open rate
Estimated share of emails “opened” — badly distorted by Apple Mail Privacy Protection and other auto-loads.
Say it out loud
“The number everyone still reports and almost nobody should be deciding anything with.”
Open rate counts a tracking pixel loading. Since privacy features began loading images automatically, that event no longer maps onto a person reading anything. It retains some value as a relative signal between two sends on the same audience in the same week; it has almost none as an absolute number.
Fired on delivery. Nobody read anything.
The error runs in both directions, which is why it cannot be corrected.
Use instead:
clicks · replies · revenue against a holdout
The last one is the only measure that survives contact with a finance team.
Nobody's
Nothing to action — it changes a number or a risk you report.
What goes wrong
Comparing this quarter's open rate to a benchmark published before September 2021, or to another brand with a different Apple share. Both comparisons are arithmetic on incompatible units.
The dated rules behind this
A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.
- Open rate is not a measurement any moreGlobal · Apple
- Klaviyo counts Apple machine opens toward revenue by defaultGlobal · Klaviyo
See also
Where this sits
Stop 8, it comes back as numbers. The reactions become a dashboard, and the dashboard is lying to you a little.