Well, almost useless, at least.
Let me explain.
First of all, you’re not in business to get your emails opened, are you? You’re in business to make money.
So what does that tell you?
Well if you had to choose between making $100 per email while having a 50% open rate or making $1,000 per email but having an open rate of 12%, which one would you choose?
So, we’re optimizing for sales, not for opens—an important distinction to make.
“But Alex, if you increase your open rate from 12% to 50%, wouldn’t you make more money?” In theory yes, in practice no.
I first learned this from email marketer John Bejakovic, who shared his odd discovery that all his emails with the highest profits had the lowest open rates. I share this discovery.
Why does this happen? Who knows? There could be (and there are) multiple reasons.
One of the most logical explanations has to do with the subject line. If a subject line is highly specific, then fewer people will open your emails. But the people who do will be better-qualified buyers, and thus earning you more money.
On the other hand. It’s not just all about money > open rates.
Open rates themselves are flawed. Over the years many ESPs have taken different privacy actions to protect their users. This means that the methods used to track if people opened your emails aren’t working anymore.
How do you even know if people opened your email in the first place? Well, that’s done through embedded images.
Whenever I send an email, my ESP (Beehiiv) embeds a tiny image, just one single pixel. If you open the email, you’ll automatically send a request to download that image.
But here’s the thing. A lot of people have images disabled. Aka, you can’t track them. And here’s the new change. Google, outlook, and many others intercept these images and alter them before showing them to you in your inbox. Also disabling the tracker that’s embedded.
So yeah. You can’t trust email open rates. And you shouldn’t take drastic measures regarding them.
But there’s something else you can trust. Those are the fundamentals of email marketing. Learning how to write quick and easy emails that get you paid and keep your readers reading every day. No longer do you have to follow rules and metrics made up by people who know nothing about email.
Just do you, write engaging emails, and get paid.
Interested? Learn more about how to do so here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/