The end of the opening rate?
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Marie Chevrie
Category: Email marketing
Historically, the open rate is a metric widely used by CRM managers to analyze and monitor the performance of their marketing campaigns. Today, it lies at the heart of many marketing strategies, and questioning its reliability can be destabilizing.
Yet despite its level of use, the open rate hides many flaws, and the release of Apple's new operating systems (OS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey and watchOS 8), only serves to highlight them even more. The need for CRM managers to rethink its use in their campaign monitoring strategies is now essential.
On September 20, Apple rolled out iOS 15, which comes with a host of new features, one of which in particular affects open rates; the Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature. This new feature enables users of Apple's Mail app to protect their email activities.
The open rate is calculated using an invisible image placed in the e-mail (commonly called a pixel). When the images in the email are downloaded, this returns the open rate information.
It should be noted that the reliability of the open rate has already been questionable for some time. Long before Apple Mail Privacy Protection, the automatic downloading and caching of images was already a growing practice:
Apple is simply accelerating an already well-established trend.
Firstly, because you are certainly already doing things very well:
Then there's the fact that marketing campaigns have no shortage of interesting indicators to track their performance, to name but a few:
This could also be a good time to get closer to your customers and ask them what they prefer, in terms of content and frequency, so you can adapt your scenarios even further...
Not necessarily, the open rate remains a good indicator if you review its use. It shouldn't be one of your campaign objectives, but a way for you to monitor the health of your deliverability by comparing it to itself. You can always use it to :
This is a positive period, as it allows you to update the way you use your metrics, and to personalize and monitor your marketing campaigns more precisely. Even if it's disorienting, you're already doing very well on your other campaigns (social networks) without the open rate.
To sum up and help you navigate this transition period, here's our suggested action plan: