Stop Tracking Open Rates. Your Deliverability Will Thank You.

Open rate has been the headline metric of email marketing for two decades. It has never been less reliable than it is right now. Most email marketers still check it first, treat it as a signal of campaign health, and make decisions based on it. In most cases, it is telling them almost nothing useful.

This is not a niche opinion anymore. The case against open rate as a primary metric has been building for years, and it has gotten harder to ignore. When I dug deeper into our own sending data at AutoSend and talked to customers running campaigns at scale, the pattern was consistent: the teams obsessing over open rates were making worse decisions than the ones ignoring it entirely.

Here is why.

The number is broken before you even read it

Open rate works by embedding a tiny invisible image into every email you send. When a recipient opens the email and their client loads images, that pixel fires and logs an open. Seems straightforward. The problem is that almost every major inbox provider now interferes with this in some way.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which rolled out in 2021, preloads all images through Apple's proxy servers before the user does anything. Every Apple Mail user on your list registers as an open automatically, whether or not they ever saw your email. Depending on your list composition, that could be 30 to 50 percent of your recipients registering as "opened" before a single human eyeball touched the email.

Gmail caches images on its own servers, stripping out timestamp and device data in the process. You see an open. You do not know when, or from where, or if it was a real person at all, because email security scanners and bots routinely trigger pixels during automated scanning too.

The number in your open rate dashboard is a cocktail of real opens, bot activity, Apple pre-fetches, Gmail caching, and blocked loads. It is not a metric. It is noise with a percentage sign attached.

It is also quietly hurting your deliverability

This is the part that does not get talked about enough. Open tracking does not just give you bad data. It can actively make your emails harder to deliver.

Gmail and Outlook have gotten very good at identifying promotional and marketing emails. One of their clearest signals is the presence of a tracking pixel pointing to a third-party domain. It is exactly what spammers use. When your email arrives with a hidden image calling out to an external server, providers treat it with suspicion. Sometimes that means the spam folder. Sometimes that means a banner that reads "This message might be suspicious." Either way, your email is starting at a disadvantage before the recipient has a chance to engage.

This is consistent with what we have observed across AutoSend customers too. When open tracking is disabled, deliverability improves. It is not a guaranteed fix for everything, but it is a meaningful variable.

Optimizing for it makes your decisions worse

Even if the data were accurate, open rate is the wrong thing to optimize for. It measures whether someone's email client loaded an image. That is not engagement. That is not intent. That is not conversion.

The downstream effects of treating it like a real metric are subtle but compounding. You A/B test subject lines based on open rate and end up optimizing for curiosity rather than relevance. You conclude your list is healthy because opens look strong, while replies and clicks quietly tell a different story. You keep sending to people who technically "opened" your emails but never once acted on anything, gradually wearing down your sender reputation with an audience that is not actually interested.

A high open rate can mask a broken campaign for a surprisingly long time.

What to look at instead

Click-through rate is a real signal. Someone read enough to click, then decided to act. No proxy server fakes that.

Reply rate is better still, especially for campaigns where you are trying to start a conversation. A reply means someone read your email, had a reaction, and responded. That is about as high-intent as email engagement gets.

For transactional or product-driven email, track completions. Did the user verify their account? Did they follow through on the action your email prompted? That is your metric.

None of these numbers are as satisfying to look at as a big open rate percentage. But they reflect what is actually happening, and decisions made on them hold up.

The practical change

If you are using AutoSend, open tracking is off by default, so you are already starting in the right place. If you are on another platform, go into your settings and turn it off before your next send. Most tools have it enabled by default, so you will need to actively look for it. Then set up click tracking if you have not already, and define one primary metric for the campaign before you send it. Not after. Decide upfront whether success means a click, a reply, or a conversion, and measure against that.

Give it two or three campaigns. Compare your spam complaint rate and click rate against previous sends. The open rate number will disappear from your dashboard, and you will likely find you do not miss it.