Coming up in this post...
First: What is an “open rate” in email marketing, how is it measured and why has its accuracy always been somewhat unreliable?
Traditionally the open rate has been considered to be among the most important metrics to track, but there are a few problems in relation to its accuracy that have always rendered it only semi-reliable.
The same goes for email. Although not all emails are designed to trigger an action (some are intended merely to provide information), in cases where the goal is some sort of action – a high open rate may not necessarily be an indication of campaign “success” because if many people open the email but the clickthrough rate is low, the conversion rate will be lousy too.
How does Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection affect Open Rates and why is this alarming for (some) Email Marketers?
“In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

How many people will this new feature apply to? (TL;DR: A lot)

What are industry experts saying?
For example, it is used in list-hygiene campaigns to identify and purge inactive or unengaged subscribers, in triggered messaging campaigns where additional messages are tailored specifically based on opens or non-opens, in personalization and dynamic email content and more. So, by disabling pixel-tracking functionality, Apple won’t just be making life harder for marketers to execute and analyze a variety of different types of email campaigns, but also degrading the user experience for email subscribers since it will be more difficult for marketers to tailor content that’s specifically relevant for individual recipients.
- According to CM Group, “This change is like the many that have preceded it in the email industry – like when Outlook stopped loading images by default, the introduction of the Gmail promotions tab, the GDPR, and others. With each of these changes, email marketing has persisted, evolved, and continued to thrive and we know that the same will be true with the Apple update.”
- Casey Newton, a Verge contributing editor, says “Looking at Apple’s privacy moves, I’m mostly willing to take them at face value – as a necessary counter-balance to the inexorable rise of tracking technologies around the web. But it also seems clear that the value to Apple goes far beyond customer satisfaction – and as its revenues from ads and in-app purchases grow, we’d do well to keep an eye on how its policies are gradually reshaping the economy.”
- Validity’s VP for Customer Engagement, Guy Hanson, says “Apple’s changes to protect mail privacy are evolutionary, not revolutionary”: The signal accuracy provided by pixel-based open tracking has been gradually degraded over time”, and as research shows, “Email marketers have been responding for some time already with only a quarter of senders using open rates to measure program relevance, with clicks used twice as widely.”
- In Litmus’s recently published The Mail Privacy Protection Survival Guide for Marketers, they say, “At the end of the day, it’s all about our subscribers and what they want. If they prefer their privacy, we should respect that. However, privacy comes with a trade-off: personalization. And people want that, too. So while Apple’s intention is to protect subscribers, it may backfire with people ultimately getting even more unwanted emails as marketers will have one less engagement signal to look at.“
- Phrasee’s Perry Malm says “This does *not* mean that open rates are dead, as several rather misinformed people have decried. However, it *does* mean that open rates as a KPI will become noisier than before. Note: this is not to say that they will become useless. Just noisier.”
SIDE NOTE: Is the open rate really dead??
I don’t think that those who have decried that the “open rate is dead” (or at least, it will be once Apple’s MPP has been widely adopted) are “misinformed”. Rather, by becoming “noisier” (and as the Email Client Market Share stats I mentioned above demonstrate, it’s not just a little noisier but significantly noisier) – even with attempts to filter out non-Apple devices from open rate results and other creative mathematical workarounds for deciphering post-MPP “noise”, the open rate will simply become far too unreliable as a KPI, and therefore pointless to track moving forward, let alone inform email campaign analysis and strategy. That’s why I stand by the headline I chose for this post, even if some in the industry are determined to maintain CPR (as in, the life saving procedure, not an email marketing metric) on the open rate for a little while longer.
Even with attempts to filter out non-Apple devices from open rate results and other creative mathematical workarounds for deciphering post-MPP "noise", the open rate will simply become far too unreliable as a KPI, and therefore pointless to track moving forward, let alone inform email campaign analysis and strategy.
- Kerri Driscoll, VP of marketing strategy at Merkle says “It’s challenging to lose foundational metrics, but opens are considered by many to be a vanity metric in any case. It’s time to move on. Although opens may still be an historical indicator of list hygiene, they will likely no longer work as an indicator of success. Use this opportunity to reach beyond the open and think about the multichannel moments and points of connectivity that will provide that next best message and experience for your customers.”
- ConvertKit Founder & CEO Nathan Barry tweeted “Apple is removing creators’ primary tool for maintaining a clean list. This puts creators at an unfair disadvantage to get their work in front of their biggest fans. Inbox providers ask senders to keep their list clean, but then take away the metrics needed to actually do that.” “I’m a huge fan of more privacy controls for consumers, but we need a better solution for ethical creators to maintain clean lists and follow best practices. My hope is that Apple, Google, and others will make these tools available so we can all follow their guidelines.
- Senior Director of Product Marketing at Cheetah Digital, Nicholas Einstein, says, “Senders are going to need to adjust tactics to accommodate the initiative, for sure, but those who have dubbed it “pixelgeddon” may be making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.” “Tenured email marketers have seen many more disruptive forces over the years than Apple’s new initiative, and have continued to steward the highest converting, biggest ROI channel for over two decades. Apple’s news will require some adjustments, but should be viewed as a natural evolution in the tech giant’s consumer-first, privacy-positive posture. Senders who preside over customer-centric programs that offer a true value exchange will continue to flourish in this new privacy-as-a-feature era.“
- Will DeKrey, Group Product Manager of Campaigns at
HubSpot says that companies will need to “get better and better at building trusted relationships with their audience, earning the right to learn who they are and what they’re interested in.”
“Personalization isn’t going away. Conversion optimization isn’t going away. A/B testing isn’t going away. But each of these will need to be more focused on building deeper relationships and more meaningful actions”.
- Rachel Cowlishaw, Associate Director of Strategy (Retail) at Movable Ink, says, “While you may hear doomsday bells in the background, don’t heed their call quite yet. Contextual personalization isn’t as popular as it was ten years ago, and most retailers have a wealth of zero and first-party data that they leverage to create sophisticated email marketing campaigns. Retailers may have to rethink some of their tactics, but that could ultimately lead to more personalized, scalable campaigns that drive revenue and build better relationships with customers.”
- Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton opines, “I’m sure newsletter publishers will adjust, somehow. If open rates are gone, they’re gone – you’ll have to find some other way to convince advertisers you have an attentive audience, and some other way to see how your email performed and keep your list clean. (Clickthrough rates live on, at least for now. Should we expect stripping URL parameters to be a feature in iOS 17?) But this is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook – they’re also coming for your Substack.”
- Trendline Interactive SVP of Innovation Alex Williams opines, “Instead of being fearful of changes to privacy rules and regulations or looking for tricky ways to manipulate the system, redirect that energy into embracing the changes. Data privacy and protection laws are designed to protect users, not marketers. More focus on the true signals of intent is a good thing for marketing. My hope is that those great ideas that were killed by metrics that didn’t actually prove anything will unleash a new era of creativity. This earthquake will pass and we will build a new more sustainable future based on the true fundamentals of great marketing.“
- Scott Cohen, Sr. Email Marketing Manager at Purple says, “Marketers need to take a deep breath. The inbox is a place of incredible influence, whether it’s directly via opens and clicks or indirectly through future engagement with your brand. There are two big things that email marketers need to do right now: (1) Make first-party/zero-party data collection an absolute must-have for your program (2) Establish benchmarks for your programs both by direct and indirect influence.“
- Ryan Phelan, Co-founder and CMO at RPEOrigin, says “It’s not that bad. I have written over and over again that opens were a directional metric to begin with. Apple has just pushed us to the stark realization that we depended on it far too often. It’s time to start thinking differently. I think, in a year, this will be just like the aftermath of Google Tabs. Not that big of a deal.“
- Motiva AI CEO, David Gutelius, says “For many email marketers, this may seem like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Still, if you care about your work and want it to drive actual results and business impact, this can be the catalyst you need to drive organizational change.”
“While this announcement ushers in broad changes to how we think about, measure, and deliver emails to our customers, we believe it will be a net positive for consumers and email marketers.“
- Head of Research at Oracle Marketing Consulting, Chad S. White, opines, “Hopefully, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection features will cause you to think critically about how you’re using open-based metrics. But to call opens purely a vanity metric is to misunderstand the important role they play in measuring performance, maintaining good deliverability, and crafting efficient email experiences. Identifying and creating an audience segment of real openers now will allow you to continue to use opens to create better emails.
In the absence of the Open Rate as a reliable KPI, how can email marketers gain meaningful insights that inform effective marketing analysis and strategy?
Some would argue that since it’s so difficult to get people to subscribe to your mailing list in the first place, it’s better to keep them in the list even if they turn out to be inactive, in the hope that maybe one day they might open an email. But others argue that if those subscribers have demonstrated that they are consistently uninterested in your emails, then what’s the point of sending them emails they don’t want? Furthermore, inactive subscribers adversely skew your open rate giving you a false impression of your email campaign ‘success’, so they are literally dead weight.
To sum up: Coming to terms with the gradual but inevitable demise of the Open Rate and CTOR (Click-to-open Rate) and looking to the future.
The sooner email marketers can accept that we’re entering a new era of email analytics where the open rate is no longer king (or rather, no longer anything, really) and that moving forward it’s going to be “All hail the clickthrough rate!” (as well as a variety of other metrics) – the sooner we can shift our approach to measuring email campaign performance and optimizing email subject lines and content to maximize engagement and conversion.
