Email open rates are a misleading metric, DMA says

Email open rates nearly doubled in 2022 while click-to-open rates experienced a dip, raising questions over the authenticity of open rates as a measurement of success for marketers, a new study claims. 

What’s happened 

• That’s one of the findings in the Email Benchmarking Report 2023, produced by marketing automation provider Deployteq and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA UK), which revealed a 13% jump in open rates, reaching a high of 31.8%. 
• But this was inflated by bot accounts taking advantage of a change in Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) policy, which marks emails as ‘open’ as soon as they are delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
• Meanwhile, nearly all sectors observed a year-on-year increase in delivery rates. Retail reached a new high of 98.9% in 2022 while the Finance sector, after years of low deliverability, experienced a positive increase to 98.8%.

Why it matters

The inflated open rate due to the MPP has raised questions over the accuracy of open rate as a true measurement of campaign effectiveness. Marketers need to explore new metrics to evaluate success, and that need is only going to become more urgent with the implementation of Apple’s Link Tracking Protection policy that will make it even harder to measure engagement with marketing emails.

Deployteq collected direct supply-side performance data from 2022, establishing key email performance metrics on which brand campaigns can be benchmarked.

Sourced from DMA