Email opens are not a very accurate metric.
Image caching, blocking images, and emailing clients, like voice assistants or smart watches, that do not render ideas can make it difficult to track pixel-based open rates.
They’re inflated through pre-fetching. Apple Mail Privacy Protection is the most notorious example, which tries to hide real user opens in a flood of auto-generated ones.
When MPP was launched two years ago, the cry “Opens is dead!” immediately arose. They should be ignored, just as the cry “Email is Dead” was.
This is especially true for B2B marketers, as they are likely to be more affected than their B2C counterparts.
MPP has altered how and when marketers can use Open. Understanding the changes begins with understanding…
The ESP Reports are Opened
A lot of confusion about the reliability of open reports is due to email service providers (ESPs) being too opaque in their reporting of how MPP affects them.
Apple made the switch at a time when everyone was confused. Despite the fact that MPP was launched many months ago, some ESPs still haven’t mentioned it.
In 2022, many marketers were bragging publicly about how they had increased their open rates to 50%, 80%, or even 100%! Apple had created a false impression that the ESP did not dispel.
Today, ESPs can handle Apple Auto Open in three different ways.
- Reporting auto opens, and all others open. Your ESP’s actions in 2022 may have boosted your open rates. It may feel good to have a high available rate, but the data is mostly useless and difficult to use.
- Only report reliable opens. Your ESP would have done this if your open rates had declined in 2022. Oracle uses this approach with its Responsys, Eloqua, and other platforms. It’s a risky move, but it allows marketers to use their open rates and opens in the same way they did before MPP, even though Apple’s auto-opening is obscuring the real openings.
- Calculating an adjusted open rate. Your ESP figured an adjusted open rate if your available rates remained largely unchanged by 2022. It ignored subscribers who generated auto-opens and based the calculation of the general rate on non-MPP users. This approach has the advantage that historical available rates are still useful. However, it is also less accurate. It can lead you to believe that more people than you really do have opened your emails.
Investigate your ESP’s approach if you are unsure. Determine if your ESP allows you to separate auto-opens from MPP users from reliable opens for non-MPP users. Oracle, for example, strips auto-open from its reporting in Responsys, Eloqua, and other products. However, we still allow our customers to view auto-open data on an individual basis.
You can calculate your own adjusted open rate by knowing the percentage of the audience that has enabled MPP. (These are the people who generate auto-opens) And the available rate for your non-MPP audience. You can then extrapolate the non-MPP rate to your MPP audience. Available rates are never 100% accurate.
It’s time for new benchmarks in open rate benchmarking if you do not have access to this data. The adoption of MPP peaked over a year ago. Therefore, available rates year-over-year should be fairly stable. The data allows you to see if your campaigns have performed better or worse than last year.
Four Ways Opens Are Still Useful
All of the following uses are made easier by having reliable opens. You can still benefit from them even if all you have is access to opens that open automatically.
Changes in your open rates are just as important as your actual oavailablerate when it comes to the first three cases. You can use the changes in your ESP report to conclude, regardless of how it opens.
Understanding Campaign Engagement
All of your email campaigns, especially if you are a media or consumer brand, don’t aim to increase sales. Some, perhaps even the majority, are aimed at driving brand engagement, lead scoring, and retention. Opens are an important measure, along with website activity and clicks.
Measurement of Click-to-Open Rates
When you compare the ratio of clickers to openers, you can understand two things.
What is the alignment of your subject line with your email body?
Your body copy’s effectiveness in driving clicks
Check to see if your subject line is vague or misleading. If you’re clear on what your subscribers will find when they click through to open the email, it is possible that the body copy of the email is not performing as well as it should.
Major Delivery Problems
Suppose you have been blocked or are experiencing major deliverability problems with an inbox provider. In that case, this will be evident in your open rate–especially if the inbox provider can break down your open rate. If you don’t have a deliverability service, your available rates are probably the best indicator of any major deliverability problems.
Managing Subscriber Inactivity
It’s not just for MPP users. Opens remain the best way to determine whether subscribers are safe to mail. Use reliable open to measure engagement with your subscribers when you have them.
You’ll have to use more email clicks if you don’t. When determining whether or not a subscriber has been active, you may want to consider the frequency and recentness of their purchases, visits to websites, use of apps, and other activities.
The Open Rate Has Changed
MPP has changed the way email marketing is done, and it no longer relies on open rates.
Subject Line Optimization and Testing
Before MPP, subject line open rates were used almost universally to determine the success of subject lines and to power subject recommendation engines. This was unfortunate because brands want subscribers to do more than just open emails. They want them to engage with the brand on a deeper, more meaningful level. Available rates are not always able to predict this, especially if a subject line is too vague or clever.
Due to MPP, subject-line optimization engines now incorporate clicks into their algorithm. Marketers are also relying more heavily on clicks when testing subject lines.
This is, for me, one of the few positives that I can see in MPP. It has made it harder for brands than ever to satisfy their customers and to send messages only to engaged subscribers.
Send Time Optimization
Send time optimization engines have adjusted their algorithms in a similar way to subject line optimization engines that adapted after the MPP. The benefits are identical because brands want to send their campaigns at a time when they will be more likely to open them. They also want to send them when subscribers have the most time to interact. Clicks are the best indicator for this.
Send time optimization engines react slower now to changes in engagement times for individual subscribers because clicks are less frequent. Send time optimization is still a better option than a universal time unless you are a regular sender.
Open-Triggered Journeys
Email journeys, where an opening in the previous email triggers the following message, are no longer viable. iIsa great alternative to driving these journeys.