No One Cares About Your Open Rate: What to Measure Instead

The email open rate is the horoscoped metric of marketing—vague, seductive, and often meaningless. For years, brands have plastered their performance reports with inflated open rates like gold stars on a first-grade spelling test. But in a post-iOS 15 world where Apple Mail Privacy Protection skews the data and bots trigger pixels, the truth is clear: open rate is not only unreliable, it’s irrelevant to growth.

So why are so many marketers still optimizing subject lines like their job depends on it?

Because for years, it did. But now, smart marketers are shifting their attention to the downstream metrics that tell the real story: engagement, conversion, and contribution to revenue. This article walks you through what to measure instead—and how to prove the value of your email marketing without falling for vanity metrics.

The Cold Truth About Open Rates

Open rate used to be a useful directional metric. It helped marketers A/B test subject lines, identify list fatigue, and benchmark email health. But since Apple Mail Privacy Protection (launched in September 2021), opens are preloaded on the user’s behalf whether they interact with the email or not. This means a 60% open rate could mean half your list looked at your email—or that Apple just ghost-opened it for them.

If you’re still using open rate as a north star, you’re navigating with a broken compass.

Consider this scenario:
A beauty subscription brand was running a “30% off” reactivation campaign to dormant customers. The open rate was stellar—above 50%. But revenue? Crickets. After digging deeper, they found most of the opens came from Apple users whose devices triggered opens automatically. The real indicator of engagement was clicks—and they were dismal.

What You Should Measure Instead (And Why It Matters)

1. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)

This metric filters the noise of inflated open rates by looking at how many people clicked after opening. It’s a clean way to measure content relevance and CTA strength.

How to use it:
Stop obsessing over subject lines and focus on email design, CTA clarity, and the strength of your offer. A low CTOR means people opened but didn’t care enough to act.

Industry benchmark: According to Campaign Monitor, a healthy CTOR sits around 10–15%. Anything lower suggests weak content or misaligned offers.

2. Clicks Per Unique Send

Unlike CTOR, which is conditioned on opens, this looks at unique clicks relative to total delivered emails. It gives you a clearer picture of how many people actually engaged with your email—regardless of whether an open was registered.

Pro tip: If you’re seeing high CTOR but low clicks per unique send, your “open” data is likely inflated. Shift your testing strategy accordingly.

3. Conversion Rate Per Email

This is the golden metric—how many people bought, signed up, or completed your desired action from a given email. It’s where the rubber meets the revenue.

How to track it:
Use UTM parameters and tie clicks back to conversion data in Google Analytics or your ESP. Platforms like Klaviyo or Postscript (for SMS) can connect email and transaction data to show clear ROI.

4. Revenue Per Recipient (RPR)

Open rate won’t keep your job. Revenue per recipient might. This measures how much revenue your email generates per person it was sent to—regardless of whether they opened or clicked.

Why it matters:
It normalizes performance across campaigns and helps you prioritize sends that generate value, not just attention. At Hawke Media, we often use RPR to evaluate winback vs. campaign flows when advising on email budget allocation (see more on Lifecycle Marketing at Hawke).

5. List Health: Deliverability, Unsubscribes, and Spam Complaints

Low open rates might indicate a deliverability issue—but so might high bounce rates, a rise in spam complaints, or an uptick in unsubscribes.

What to watch:

• Hard bounce rate: Keep it under 0.5%.

• Spam complaints: Anything over 0.1% is a red flag.

• Unsubscribes: Look at this alongside email frequency. If one-off sends spike unsubscribes, your content or offer might be off-message.

A clean list is a profitable list. Open rate won’t tell you if Gmail is silently sending you to Promotions (or worse, Spam). Your domain health metrics will.

Applying the Metrics in Practice

Let’s revisit a client story: a mid-market outdoor gear brand was struggling with email performance. Their open rates were average—hovering around 25%. But sales were flat, and they couldn’t figure out why. Once Hawke’s Lifecycle team rebuilt their reporting around RPR and email conversion rate, the answer became obvious: their triggered flows (especially cart abandonment and product replenishment) were driving 80% of email revenue, but got less than 20% of send volume.

We rebalanced their lifecycle calendar, added segmentation to suppress repeat purchasers from weekly blasts, and used CTOR to identify the best-performing content themes. Within 90 days, revenue per email increased 36%, unsubscribes dropped by half, and list churn slowed.

It didn’t matter that their open rate barely budged. Their emails made more money.

Moving Forward: Build Your Email Scorecard

Stop chasing the ghosts of open rates and start building a report that reflects real business outcomes. Here’s a simple scorecard framework to get you started:

Metric	Purpose	Frequency to Review
Click-to-Open Rate	Measures email content engagement	Weekly
Clicks per Unique Send	Measures campaign interest	Weekly
Conversion Rate	Tracks campaign success	Weekly
Revenue per Recipient	Gauges impact on bottom line	Weekly / Campaign level
List Churn Rate	Identifies attrition / fatigue	Monthly
Deliverability Score	Maintains sender reputation	Monthly

Make sure these KPIs roll into your broader marketing dashboard. And when you report to leadership, frame your email performance around ROI, not romanticized metrics from a different era.

The Takeaway

Email marketing still works—if you measure what matters. Open rate may be the metric that refuses to die, but it won’t help you grow, and it certainly won’t justify budget.

Focus instead on clicks, conversions, revenue, and retention. Let go of vanity. Embrace impact.

Because no one cares how many people opened your email.

Only what they did next.