Why your newsletter open rate doesn't matter as much as you think
Open rates used to be the go-to metric for newsletters. They are not reliable anymore. Here is what to measure instead.
Your open rate is probably wrong. Not slightly off. Genuinely unreliable. If you are making decisions about your newsletter based primarily on open rates, you are steering with a broken compass.
That is the honest answer. Here is why, and what to look at instead.
What happened to open rates
Open rates used to work like this: your email platform embeds a tiny invisible image in each email. When someone opens the email, the image loads, and the platform counts that as an open. Simple enough.
Then Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in late 2021. What it does is pre-load all email content, including that tracking pixel, regardless of whether the person actually opens the email. So if someone on your list uses Apple Mail on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac, they register as having opened every single email you send them. Even if they never looked at it. Even if it went straight to the archive.
This is not a small edge case. Apple Mail accounts for a significant chunk of email opens across most audiences. Some estimates put it above 50% depending on your subscriber demographics. If half your list is showing as opened no matter what, your open rate number is inflated by default.
Other email clients and privacy tools have followed Apple's lead since. The direction of travel is clear: email tracking is getting less accurate, not more.
The number is not useless, but nearly
I am not saying you should ignore open rates entirely. If your open rate drops from 45% to 20% overnight, something has gone wrong and you should investigate. Deliverability issues, a bad subject line, or getting caught in spam filters can all cause sudden drops that are worth catching.
But the absolute number is not meaningful anymore. Saying "my open rate is 42%" does not tell you much because you do not know how much of that is real opens versus Apple Mail pre-loads. Comparing your open rate to 'industry benchmarks' is even less useful because those benchmarks are polluted by the same problem.
Where open rates still have some value is in relative comparison. If you test two subject lines on the same list and one gets a higher open rate than the other, that difference is probably real even if the absolute numbers are inflated. The inflation affects both versions roughly equally, so the relative performance still tells you something.
But as your primary measure of whether your newsletter is working? No. You need better signals than that.
Click rate: the metric that actually tells you something
Click rate measures how many people clicked a link in your email. Unlike opens, clicks require a deliberate action from the reader. They had to see the link, decide it was worth clicking, and actually click it. Apple Mail Privacy Protection does not fake clicks.
This makes click rate a massively more reliable indicator of engagement. If people are clicking links in your newsletter, they are reading it, finding value in it, and acting on it. That is real engagement, not a tracking pixel being pre-loaded by a mail client.
A good click rate varies by industry and format, but for most newsletters, anything above 2-3% is solid. If you are consistently hitting 5% or above, your content is genuinely resonating.
The other thing click rate tells you is what your audience actually cares about. If you feature five articles and one of them gets 80% of the clicks, that is useful editorial information. It tells you what topics to cover more often and what to quietly drop. Open rates cannot give you that level of specificity.
Replies: the signal hiding in plain sight
The most underrated newsletter metric is replies. When someone hits reply and writes you a message, whether that is a question, a disagreement, a "thanks for sharing this," or a "you should check out this other thing," that is the strongest possible signal that your newsletter matters to them.
Replies do not show up in most analytics dashboards. You cannot graph them or put them in a report. But they tell you more about the health of your newsletter than any metric that does appear in a dashboard. A newsletter that generates five replies per issue is doing something really right, even if the open rate looks mediocre.
There is a practical benefit too. Replies improve your deliverability. When someone replies to your email, it tells their email provider that this is a real conversation they want to have. That makes it more likely your future emails land in the inbox rather than the promotions tab or spam folder.
If you want more replies, ask for them. Not in a desperate way, but naturally. End your newsletter with a question. Ask what readers thought about a particular topic. Invite them to share something you missed. People are surprisingly willing to reply when given a clear prompt.
Subscriber growth: the long game
Growth rate is another metric worth paying attention to. Not vanity metrics like total subscriber count (which tells you nothing about quality), but net growth: new subscribers minus unsubscribes over time.
Steady net growth means your newsletter is attracting new readers faster than it is losing existing ones. That is a healthy sign. If growth stalls or goes negative, something needs to change, whether that is how you promote the newsletter, what you cover, or how often you send it.
Unsubscribe rate specifically is worth watching. A small number of unsubscribes after every issue is completely normal. If unsubscribes spike suddenly, that is worth investigating. Did you change format? Send too frequently? Cover a topic that alienated part of your audience? The unsubscribe spike is feedback, and it is worth listening to.
What to actually track
If I were starting a newsletter today and could only look at three things, they would be: click rate per issue, number of replies, and net subscriber growth per month. These are the signals that high-performing newsletters consistently track. Those three numbers, tracked consistently over time, tell you whether your newsletter is working, what your audience values, and whether the thing is growing.
Open rates would be a distant fourth, used mainly as a tripwire to catch deliverability problems rather than as a measure of content quality.
The tools built into most email platforms give you click rates and growth data for free. Replies you need to count manually (or just keep a rough mental tally). None of this requires expensive analytics software or a data team. It just requires paying attention to the right things.
The metric that matters most
There is one more metric worth mentioning, and it is not really a metric at all. It is whether people tell others about your newsletter. Word of mouth. Forwards. Someone saying "you should subscribe to this" in a meeting or a group chat.
You cannot measure this directly, but you can see its effects in your subscriber growth. If you are growing without actively promoting, people are sharing it. That is the ultimate validation that what you are building is genuinely useful.
No tracking pixel can tell you that. But it matters more than all the dashboards combined.
Cheers