Why Your Email Open Rates Don’t Matter Anymore (And What to Track Instead)

You check your email campaign stats. 45% open rate. Not bad, right?

Here’s the problem: that number is essentially fiction.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which now covers over 50% of email users, pre-fetches all emails and marks them as “opened” whether the recipient actually read them or not. Gmail’s image caching creates similar issues. Your “45% open rate” might really be 20%—or 60%. You simply can’t know.

In 2026, obsessing over open rates is like navigating with a broken compass. You feel like you’re tracking something meaningful, but you’re actually flying blind.

The good news? Better metrics exist. Metrics that directly correlate with revenue, customer engagement, and business growth. Let’s explore what actually matters.

The Death of the Open Rate

Open rates worked when email clients downloaded a tiny tracking pixel each time someone viewed your message. Simple and reliable—for about two decades.

Then everything changed:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection (2021): Pre-loads all email content, triggering false opens
• Gmail Image Caching: Serves images from Google’s servers, obscuring actual open data
• Outlook Privacy Features: Similar protections rolling out across Microsoft’s ecosystem
• Growing Privacy Regulations: GDPR, CCPA, and new 2026 regulations limit tracking capabilities

According to Litmus, Apple Mail now accounts for over 55% of all email opens. When more than half your “opens” are potentially fake, the metric loses all meaning.

But here’s what most marketers miss: open rates never told you much anyway.

An open doesn’t mean someone read your email. It doesn’t mean they found it valuable. It definitely doesn’t mean they’ll buy from you. It just means a pixel loaded—often automatically, often in a preview pane, often while scrolling past to something else.

The Metrics That Actually Predict Revenue

Smart email marketers in 2026 focus on metrics tied to real human actions. Here’s your new dashboard:

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

What it measures: The percentage of recipients who clicked a link in your email.

Why it matters: A click requires intention. Someone had to read enough of your email to find something worth clicking. Unlike opens, clicks can’t be faked by privacy features.

Benchmark: Aim for 2-5% CTR. Anything above 5% means your content is genuinely resonating.

How to improve it:

• Use one clear call-to-action per email
• Place important links above the fold
• Make buttons large and obvious on mobile
• Write benefit-focused link text (“Get your free guide” beats “Click here”)

2. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)

What it measures: Of people who opened, what percentage clicked?

Why it matters: While open data is fuzzy, CTOR helps you understand content effectiveness among engaged readers. A low CTOR with high opens suggests your subject lines work but your content doesn’t deliver.

Benchmark: 10-15% is solid. Above 20% is excellent.

Caveat: Use this directionally, not as an absolute number, given open rate unreliability.

3. Conversion Rate

What it measures: The percentage of recipients who completed your desired action—a purchase, signup, download, or registration.

Why it matters: This is the metric that pays your bills. Everything else is a leading indicator; conversions are the destination.

Benchmark: Varies wildly by industry. Ecommerce might see 1-2%, while a warm B2B list could hit 5-10%. Track your own baseline and improve from there.

How to improve it:

• Ensure landing pages match email promises
• Reduce friction (fewer form fields, faster load times)
• Segment your list so offers reach interested subscribers
• Test different offers, not just different subject lines

4. Revenue Per Email (RPE)

What it measures: Total revenue generated divided by emails sent.

Why it matters: RPE cuts through vanity metrics to answer the only question that matters: is email making money?

How to calculate:

Revenue Per Email = Total Email Revenue ÷ Total Emails Sent

Benchmark: This depends entirely on your business model. A $50 average order value business will have different RPE than a $5,000 B2B service. Track trends over time rather than comparing to others.

5. List Growth Rate

What it measures: How quickly your subscriber list is growing (accounting for unsubscribes and bounces).

Why it matters: A healthy list grows consistently. If you’re losing subscribers faster than you’re gaining them, no amount of optimization will save you.

How to calculate:

List Growth Rate = ((New Subscribers - Unsubscribes - Bounces) ÷ Total Subscribers) × 100

Benchmark: 2-5% monthly growth is healthy for most businesses.

6. Unsubscribe Rate

What it measures: The percentage of recipients who opt out after receiving an email.

Why it matters: Some unsubscribes are healthy (irrelevant people leaving improves your metrics). But spikes indicate problems—you’re emailing too often, content quality dropped, or you’re reaching the wrong audience.

Benchmark: Under 0.5% per campaign. Above 1% consistently signals trouble.

Building Your New Email Dashboard

Stop checking open rates daily. Instead, build a weekly dashboard around metrics that matter:

Weekly Review:

• Total emails sent
• Click-through rate (trend vs. last 4 weeks)
• Conversion rate by campaign type
• Revenue attributed to email
• Unsubscribe rate

Monthly Review:

• List growth rate
• Revenue per email (trend)
• Top-performing campaigns (by conversions, not opens)
• Segment performance comparison

Quarterly Review:

• Email revenue as percentage of total revenue
• Customer lifetime value of email-acquired customers
• List health audit (engagement segments)

How Automation Changes the Metrics Game

Here’s where it gets interesting: automated email sequences generate 320% more revenue than one-off campaigns, according to recent data.

Why? Automated emails reach people at the right moment with the right message. Someone abandons their cart—they get a reminder. Someone downloads a guide—they get related content. Someone hasn’t visited in 30 days—they get a re-engagement offer.

When you build automation workflows, you’re not just sending more emails. You’re creating systems that compound results over time. Each workflow you build continues generating clicks and conversions while you sleep.

The metrics for automated sequences look different too:

• Workflow completion rate: What percentage of people who enter a sequence complete it?
• Revenue per workflow: How much does each automation generate monthly?
• Drop-off points: Where do people stop engaging in your sequences?

These tell you far more about email effectiveness than any open rate ever could.

Practical Next Steps

Ready to move beyond open rates? Here’s your action plan:

This Week:

1. Remove open rate from your main dashboard (you can still access it, just don’t obsess over it)
2. Set up conversion tracking if you haven’t already
3. Identify your top 3 campaigns by click-through rate from the past 90 days—what made them work?

This Month:

1. Build or optimize one automated workflow (welcome sequence is the easiest starting point)
2. Calculate your current revenue per email as a baseline
3. Segment your list by engagement level (clicked in last 30/60/90 days)

This Quarter:

1. A/B test based on conversions, not opens
2. Create a re-engagement campaign for subscribers who haven’t clicked in 90+ days
3. Document your email revenue growth

The Bottom Line

Open rates had a good run. For twenty years, they helped email marketers understand basic engagement. But technology moved on, and clinging to broken metrics means making decisions based on fiction.

The marketers winning in 2026 focus on actions, not impressions. Clicks, conversions, and revenue tell you what’s actually happening in your business. Everything else is noise.

Your email list is one of your most valuable business assets—it’s an owned channel that no algorithm change can take away. Treat it that way by measuring what matters.

Stop asking “Did they open it?”

Start asking “Did they act on it?”

That shift in thinking will transform your email marketing results.