May 27, 2025
Rethinking Open Rates: What DTC Email Marketers Need to Know
For years, email open rates have been a cornerstone metric for gauging campaign performance. The logic was straightforward: if someone opens your email, they must be interested. However, in 2025, this assumption no longer holds true. A combination of changes in email client behaviors, privacy features, and bots have rendered open rates an unreliable measure of customer engagement. DTC marketers and email list managers need to understand why an open doesn't signify what it once did—and where to look instead for genuine engagement indicators.
How Open Tracking Works
Email open rates are typically tracked using a tiny, invisible image—usually a 1x1 pixel—embedded in the body of the email. When a recipient opens the email, their email client loads the images, including this tracking pixel, from the sender’s server. That image load request is what signals an “open.” Marketers can then log details like the time, IP address, and device type—unless that data is blocked or obscured by privacy features.
What gets in the way of accurate open tracking
Changes to how these pixels are treated can inflate or deflate your open rates relative to the truth of who’s actually opening your emails. These different factors make it difficult to tell what’s actually going on with opens:
Apple Mail Privacy Protection: Masking Real Engagement
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), introduced with iOS 15 in September 2021, significantly impacts email open tracking. MPP preloads email images—including tracking pixels—regardless of whether the user opens the email, leading to inflated open rates. This feature also obscures the recipient's IP address, preventing marketers from determining the user's location or device.
Given that Apple Mail clients account for a substantial portion of email opens—approximately 40-50%—this change has a profound effect on open rate metrics. Marketers can no longer rely on open rates as an accurate measure of user engagement for the significant segment of their audience that comes from Apple.
Gmail’s Image Caching Changes: Lost Data and Misleading Signals
Gmail's approach to image handling further complicates open rate tracking. Gmail caches images on its servers, serving them to users without fetching them directly from the sender's server. This process means that:
Because Gmail uses an image proxy, an open is logged from Google’s server, not the individual’s device. As a result, you can’t see the recipient’s IP address or device details from that open.
If an email looks suspicious,Gmail might block images by default and show a warning to the user. In those cases, the tracking pixel won’t load unless the recipient manually allows images, so legitimate opens won’t be counted.
These factors contribute to distorted open rate metrics, making it challenging to assess true user engagement accurately. Translation: some real opens won’t be counted, and some fake ones will.
Bots: When Opens Aren’t Human
Some opens aren’t from people at all—they’re from bots. These bots load tracking pixels (and sometimes even click links), which inflates your open rates without any real human engagement. That “opened” email? No one read it. Just a robot doing its job.
Corporate Security Scanners: Phantom Engagement
Security tools at big companies often pre-screen emails before they hit the inbox automatically opening emails to look for threats. These scanners trigger opens en masse—sometimes leading to absurd stats like 100% open rates from certain domains.
When Users Block Images: The Hidden Opens You Can’t See
Not all email opens are trackable—especially when recipients block images from automatically downloading. Some users, either by choice or due to default settings in their email client, prevent images (including tracking pixels) from loading unless they manually approve them. This is common in privacy-conscious users, older email clients, or enterprise settings where security policies are strict.
When this happens, the person might fully read and engage with your email—but since the tracking pixel never loads, it doesn’t register as an “open.” That means your open rate could underreport actual engagement from these users.
When can open rates be useful?
While open rates have become less reliable, they still hold value in specific contexts:
A/B Testing Subject lines: Comparing open rates between different subject lines can indicate which one is more effective, assuming other variables are controlled.
Part of your deliverability picture: Sudden drops in open rates aren’t always a red flag. In fact, when Orita removes bots from your reporting, open rates may appear to fall—because inflated, non-human activity is no longer counted. What really matters is the full picture: if open rates drop alongside declining click rates and declining email-driven revenue, that’s when it’s time to investigate deliverability issues.
It's crucial to interpret open rates cautiously and not use them as the sole metric for engagement.
Shift Your Focus and Your Strategy
Given the limitations of open rates, it's advisable to focus on more reliable metrics to understand engagement:
Click rate: Measures direct engagement with email content.
Conversion Rates: Tracks the percentage of recipients who complete a purchase on your site.
Revenue per person: A key measure of the lifetime value (LTV) of an email subscriber. Revenue per recipient can also be helpful to understand the efficiency of each email.
By prioritizing these metrics, marketers can gain a more accurate understanding of campaign performance and make data-driven decisions.
Move Beyond Open Rate—Get Real About Engagement
Orita’s machine learning analyzes millions of data points to help brands understand who’s actually engaged. Curious how your list is really performing? We offer a quick, no-stress email audit that gives you deep insight into your audience’s behavior.
If you’re ready to make your emails work harder for you, get started with your audit today.
