Bots are skewing your email metrics: Here’s what matters now 

Over the past few years, email marketers have faced a new challenge: traditional engagement metrics like open and click-through rates have become increasingly unreliable. With Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, sophisticated spam filtering bots, and other technological shifts, the metrics we've long relied on to measure campaign success have been fundamentally altered.

At Customer.io, we, too, face these changes in how we report our newsletter successes.

Not only has our approach to learning from our metrics shifted, but our product is also making shifts. We're committed to helping marketers adapt to this changing landscape. Our new machine open rate and click-through rate tracking feature provides visibility into pre-fetched open rates and bot clicks, helping you distinguish genuine engagement from artificial inflation. But more importantly, we want to help you shift your focus toward metrics that truly indicate campaign success.

The email marketing landscape has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. Layer after layer, changes made by inbox providers make it more difficult for marketers to assess impact.

• Privacy-first technologies: Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), introduced in iOS 15, automatically loads images in emails (including the open rate tracking pixels) regardless of whether recipients actually open them. This results in opens being pre-fetched at the delivery time on most devices.
• Growing awareness of data privacy: Consumers are increasingly concerned about how their data is collected and used, leading to stricter privacy regulations globally and, as a result, the introduction of various features like Hide My Email on Apple Mail devices.
• Sophisticated anti-spam measures: Email service providers have implemented advanced algorithms that may interact with emails to detect spam, artificially inflating engagement metrics such as click-through rates.

These shifts have had profound implications for measuring email campaign performance, particularly regarding open and click-through rates.

Open rates have traditionally been determined by tracking whether a tiny, invisible pixel loaded when an email was opened. However, this metric has become increasingly problematic:

• Apple's MPP impact: Since September 2021, when Apple introduced MPP, open rates for Apple Mail users became heavily inflated, as images automatically load whether or not someone actually viewed the email.
• Pre-fetching technology: Many email clients and security services also pre-load email content, triggering open tracking pixels without actual human engagement.
• Increasing privacy measures: Other email clients are following Apple's lead, with more privacy features being implemented that limit open rate tracking accuracy.

What was once considered a foundational metric for measuring email marketing success has become what many now recognize as a "vanity metric" – a number that might look impressive but doesn't necessarily reflect genuine engagement or predict business outcomes.

So, should you still consider open rates? We say, yes. They can still be helpful, but they shouldn’t be your end-all metric. When content lands in the spam or junk folder, you’ll notice that oftentimes, images don’t load. For this reason, we can often use the new inflated open rate metric to discover significant dips in percentage and investigate potential inbox placement issues.

So your open rates are inflated. Now what? We can still measure engagement with clicks, right? While click-through rates were once considered more reliable than open rates, they, too, have been affected by industry changes:

• Bot activity: Security systems and spam filters often follow email links to verify their safety, registering as clicks even though no human interaction occurred.
• Link scanning: Email security services may scan all links in an email, triggering click events for every link without actual recipient engagement.

The effects aren’t as dramatic as inflated opens, but they can still over-dramatize engagement with your campaigns. You can safely assume that any click within seconds of delivery is machine engagement and not authentic.

Given these changes, marketers need to adjust their expectations and approaches:

1. Recognize the limitations: Understand that open rates are now primarily applicable as relative metrics rather than absolute ones. They can still help you compare subject line performance within your campaigns, but the absolute numbers are no longer meaningful.
2. Segment your audience: If possible, consider segmenting your audience by email client to better understand the impact of privacy changes on your specific audience.
3. Focus on trends, not absolute numbers: Look for patterns and trends in your data rather than focusing on hitting specific open rate targets.
4. Expand your metric set: Incorporate additional metrics that provide a more holistic view of campaign performance.
5. Test and learn: Use A/B testing to compare relative performance rather than focusing on absolute metrics.

The silver lining in all of this? The industry is shifting toward metrics that more directly tie to business outcomes, such as:

• Conversion rates: Track how many recipients take your desired action, such as purchasing, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a resource.
• Revenue attribution: Measure the actual revenue generated from your email campaigns.
• Engagement over time: Look at how recipients engage with your brand across multiple touchpoints following an email.
• Retention metrics: Track how email campaigns impact customer retention and lifetime value.
• Unsubscribe rates: While not a positive metric, unsubscribe rates remain reliable and can indicate content relevance.
• Reply rates: Reply rates can be a valuable engagement metric for specific campaigns, especially in B2B contexts.
• Website activity: See how email campaigns drive website visits and subsequent user journeys.

Focusing on these conversion-focused metrics will help you better understand your email marketing's true impact on your business goals.

The changes in email metrics aren't just a challenge—they're an opportunity to evolve our approach to email marketing. By shifting focus from vanity metrics to conversion goals, marketers can build more effective campaigns that drive real business results.

At Customer.io, we're committed to providing tools that help you navigate this new landscape. Our new feature for reporting on machine opens and clicks is just one step in our ongoing effort to help marketers adapt to industry changes and focus on what truly matters: building meaningful relationships with your audience that drive business growth.

Remember, the most successful email marketing strategies don't chase open rates—they pursue genuine connections with recipients that lead to lasting engagement and conversion. By focusing on these meaningful metrics, you'll be well-positioned to thrive in the evolving world of email marketing.