How Accurate Are Email Open Rates? (Plus the Email Metrics to Pay Attention to in 2025).
Are Open Rates Reliable in 2025?
Earlier today, I sent an email to one of my email lists through Mailchimp.
I smiled, proud of myself, when I saw that my open rate was 20% within minutes of sending the email.
“My email subscribers love my content!” I said to myself.
I was pretty pleased, until I realized one of my email subscribers, my sister, who was on the “open” list for the last email I had sent out, hadn’t touched her email inbox.
She had been assembling a salad when I pressed “send” on the email newsletter.
Not only had she not opened the email newsletter, she didn’t even know it was there.
It was at that moment that I was reminded of a painful truth: email open rates are nearly obsolete in 2025.
They’re at best an inflated lie, and at worst, straight-up deception.
The open rates you’re seeing on your email are not reflective of how many people are actually opening and reading your emails.
If you’re tracking your email marketing success by your open rates, you’re doing it wrong and are making decisions based on false data.
In this blog post, I’m going over why open rates are fake news, and which email metrics really matter (aka the ones you should be paying attention to).
Are Email Open Rates Accurate?
Long story short…email open rates are NOT accurate.
A while ago, email open rates used to be reliable measures to track email marketing performance.
Now, they’re little more than a vanity metric.
Here’s what happened:
In September 2021, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). The MPP exaggerates open rates by tracking pixels in emails and pre-fetching email images.
This mechanism makes it appear as if Apple users have opened the email, when in fact it could be sitting unread in their inbox.
This problem isn’t only with Apple. Your subscribers who use Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail could also be providing you with false data, since spam mechanisms in those platforms might “open” an email that you send.
As a result, open rates for business owners are generally exaggerated, which means you can’t trust what you see in your email marketing platform.
Open rates are no longer a reliable metric to track subscriber engagement since they are almost always inflated.
Should I Continue Tracking Open Rates?
Just because the data isn’t completely reliable doesn’t mean you should stop tracking open rates altogether.
Your open rate is likely inflated, but not completely wrong. It will still include the data of people who open your emails.
Open rates provide useful information regarding whether or not your email newsletter content is interesting and appealing to your target audience. They should still be considered when looking at your email marketing data as a part of the whole. Said another way, open rates should not be the only metric you’re paying attention to regularly.
My advice would be to note what your open rates are, holding them loosely, knowing that there are email metrics that are more important to track and try to improve.
Email Metrics to Track in 2025
As a part of your ongoing email marketing strategy, you should closely monitor the following:
Click-Through Rate:
This is the metric that tells you what percentage of your subscriber base clicked on links in your email newsletter. This is a metric you should always try to increase, because clicks lead to conversions.
Why it matters: Click-through rates give you a good idea as to whether or not your email newsletter content was written in a way that was compelling to your audience. Email content that resonates with your subscribers is going to naturally yield a higher click-through rate, because they’ll be reading and scrolling all the way through your email.
How to improve your click-through rate: To improve your click-through rate, focus on writing content that is relevant and useful to your email subscribers. Make sure that you’re giving your email subscribers the content they signed up for. Give them what they want, not what you think they want, by periodically checking on their preferences through polls and surveys in your emails. You can get an example of a persuasive email that will increase clicks in my blog post about writing the perfection confirmation email.
Unsubscribe Rate:
This one is pretty straightforward. This metric tracks how many people are choosing to unsubscribe from your list.
Why it matters: The goal is for people to stick around for your emails. If they’re jumping ship in large batches and constantly, that’s a sign that something isn’t working in your email marketing plan. It signals a large disconnect between you, the business owner, and your email subscribers.
You don’t want to get too caught up in the unsubscribe rate, though. It can be a good thing, because in a sense, your email subscribers are self-selecting themselves off of your list, thus lowering the amount of uninterested, unengaged subscribers. As business owners, we want our email lists to be full of people who want to be there!
How to decrease your unsubscribe rate: Be super clear up-front with your potential subscribers by writing landing page copy that explains exactly what your newsletter is about and the frequency of your email newsletters. One of the primary reasons people unsubscribe is for unmet expectations around email newsletter frequency and email newsletter content.
Another way to decrease your unsubscribe rate is by creating email content that is hyper-specific to your subscribers. For example, if you are a fitness coach, you could create content based on where your subscribers are in their fitness journey (i.e., just getting started, have some experience, very experienced). The more personalized the content, the more likely subscribers are to stick around.
Conversion Rate:
This is the rate at which email subscribers are converting, or taking your ultimate desired action. Some examples include signing up for a newsletter, enrolling in a group coaching program, or subscribing to a monthly program. Essentially, this is the action you want them to take after clicking the link in your email.
Why it matters: Your conversion rate is directly tied to your bottom line. More conversions = more profit. Optimizing your conversion rate via email should be a top priority as a business owner with an email list.
How to improve your conversion rate: Write compelling emails that align with your landing page and service. For example, let’s say you’re a photographer who wants to sell summer portrait sessions. Your emails should include content around summer photography, advertising the deal.
Reply Rate:
The reply rate is the rate at which your email subscribers respond and reply to your email newsletters.
Why it matters: Getting your subscribers to reply to your emails does wonders for your email marketing. First of all, the data you get from responses is gold. Your subscribers are telling you their problems or desires in their own words. That’s information you can use in future messaging. Beyond that, subscribers responding to your emails increases the likelihood that your emails will end up in the inbox, not the spam box. Replies signal to email platforms that your emails are legitimate and not spam.
How to increase your reply rate: Invite your email subscribers to respond to you in every email you write. Encourage them by letting them know that you personally read and respond to every email you receive.
In your next email newsletter, ask one easy question to your subscribers. The key is asking something that will take them 10 or fewer seconds to respond to. Anything that requires more effort than that is going to deter responses. You could ask, “What’s the biggest problem you’re facing around [X] right now?”
Spam Complaint Rate:
This is the rate at which email subscribers mark your email newsletters as spam, aka the thing you want to avoid at all costs.
Why it matters: A high spam complaint rate will kill your email deliverability. That reduces the chances that your emails will land in the inbox. You want your email read, which is why you need to keep this as close to zero as possible.
How to keep your spam complaint rate low: Don’t spam your email subscribers! Email them your newsletters as frequently as you said you would. Enable double confirmation for your email list, so you know that the people on there really want to be there. Avoid spam trigger words in your subject lines.
Last Thoughts
Keep an eye on your open rates, but don’t obsess over them. Make sure you’re paying attention to metrics that move the needle in your business and result in more or less profit, or higher/lower deliverability.
If you want more content on all things email marketing, subscribe to my email list for twice-weekly conversations to help you write better emails for your business.
