It’s no secret that the open rate is no longer the optimal email marketing metric. But what is its role, if any, in B2B marketing?
“The number is still
there, the pixel still fires, and the dashboard still ticks up,” writes Ilya Spiridonov, who for 10 years has run outreach at a localization services company, in a post on Hackermoon.com. “What no
longer holds is the assumption underneath the metric: that an open rate of X tells me anything I can act on, whether that’s calling a deal hot, prioritizing a follow-up, or forecasting a
quarter.”
Spiridonov notes that most CRMs “auto-log email open events as activity on the deal record.” His firm not only stopped reporting
the metric, it turned off open tracking in its CRM.
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Often, firms get a signal like “Acme Corp opened the proposal 18 times,” then adjusted their forecast based on what was
“almost entirely bots and prefetch.”
Deliverability also informed this decision to turn away from opens.
“We assumed tracking pixels
themselves were hurting our inbox placement on cold outbound,” Spiridonov continues. “Gmail flags them on the recipient’s side with a ‘tracker detected’ banner.
Spam filters use them as a signal that the message is marketing email rather than personal correspondence.”
He adds, “Subject lines, sender names, send-time experiments, copy
variants. All used to be scored by open rate. We score on reply rate and post-click engagement now.”
Spiridonov concedes that the numbers are lower, but they actually mean
something.
“A campaign with a 35% open rate and zero engagement is a failure. A campaign with a 12% open rate and meaningful time on content is the one to scale,” he writes.
“Aggregate open rate told us neither.”
So here's what his team now reports in its pipeline review (and I quote):
- Real reply rate
(replies that contain prose written by a person)
- Post-click engagement rate (how many recipients spent meaningful time on shared content)
- Return-visit
rate (how many recipients came back to the content weeks later, unprompted).
That’s how one company is handling the open rate decline.