What to measure instead of Open Rates

Hi there,

Time for an update.

At the Apple Event on Tuesday, the tech company unveiled a bunch of new offerings, including the iPhone 13 and a new Apple Watch. And in a press release just afterwards, they announced iOS 15 would be available for download starting Monday, September 20. Yes, that’s yesterday.

The email privacy tools that accompany the new iOS are likely to have a significant impact on tracked Open Rates. But since the news first broke earlier this year, we’ve learned more about how it will work. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain where we’re at now, and to give you some resources for tackling the change.

Back in June, Apple announced this:

The “invisible pixels” mentioned here are also known as tracking pixels — tiny images embedded in an email that load when a recipient opens that email. That delivers a signal to the sender that tells them the email has been opened, and it’s how services like Revue calculate what the Open Rate of your newsletter issue was.

After that first announcement, most (including us) thought that would mean all subscribers using Apple Mail will register as having opened your email, skewing Open Rate data. Here’s what I wrote in June:

The information above is still largely true, but developments since then have indicated that there will be exceptions.

Litmus has rolled out a very good PDF (you can download it here) that outlines how this new privacy feature will work, and what it will mean for your stats. It’s mostly targeted towards email marketers, but there’s information in there that will be useful for any newsletter creator. Most importantly, it includes a calculator to help you work out what your real open rate would be.

The company has conducted lots of testing into how this will work, and here’s what they have to say about how many Apple Mail subscribers will register as Opens:

I won’t steal Litmus’s thunder by copying the calculator here, but I would recommend you check it out. You’ll need to know this figure for the calculation: by our estimates, based on the info we have today, around 29% of email opens come from Apple Mail, across all Revue newsletters.

Open Rates aren’t about to become completely useless — not everyone uses Apple Mail, after all — but they won’t be as reliable as they once were.

And that’s not necessarily a fundamentally bad thing. One thing we hope will happen is that newsletter creators will drill down on metrics that advance their goals, whatever they may be (I wrote about the importance of setting goals a few weeks back).

Decide on the action you want your readers to take, and make that the measure of success.

Here are some examples:

To make these data points comparable as your subscriber list grows, you can translate all of the above examples into an engagement rate. Any of the above actions counts as an ‘engagement’. 1 reply = 1 engagement, 1 purchase = 1 engagement, and so on. Here’s a helpful formula so you can measure your success over time:

So if you sent your newsletter to 250 people, and 3 replied, your calculation would look like this:

(3/250) x 100 = 1.2%

Now you can compare that each week as your subscriber list changes. Neat.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on how this affects Revue in coming weeks, and we would love to hear from you. How are you experiencing this change? Is there something missing on your metrics dashboard? Let us know!

Thanks for joining me this week. We’re yet to see how iOS 15 will impact people who work with email, but one thing is for sure: The industry will keep evolving with the landscape around it.

See you next time,

Anna