For years, email marketers have obsessed over open rates. A 25% open rate? Pretty good. Hit 30%? Time to celebrate. But here's the truth: open rates have become one of the least reliable metrics in email marketing, and clinging to them might be hurting your strategy more than helping it.
Let's talk about why open rates are fundamentally flawed, how they actually work, and what you should be measuring instead.
How Open Rates Actually Work (Spoiler: It's Messy)
Email open tracking relies on a tiny, invisible image called a tracking pixel. When someone opens your email and their email client loads the images, that pixel fires off a signal saying "this email was opened." Pretty straightforward.
But here's where it falls apart:
The pixel only works if images load. Many email clients block images by default. Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail—they all have different policies. If images don't load, you don't get counted as an open, even if the person read every word of your email.
Some email clients pre-load images. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (introduced in iOS 15) automatically loads all tracking pixels when an email arrives on their servers—not when a human actually opens it.
Bots and spam filters trigger opens. Security tools and spam filters often open emails to scan for malicious content. These aren't real humans, but they count as opens.
The result? Your open rate could be artificially high, artificially low, or just completely meaningless depending on your audience's email clients and behaviors.
Why Deliverability Matters More
Instead of obsessing over whether someone opened your email, focus on whether your emails are even getting through in the first place. Deliverability—the rate at which your emails successfully land in inboxes rather than spam folders or getting blocked entirely—is a far more actionable metric.
Good deliverability means:
- Your sender reputation is strong
- Your emails aren't being marked as spam
- You're following best practices for email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
- Your list is clean and engaged
Poor deliverability is like throwing a party and having half your invitations returned as undeliverable. You can't analyze engagement if people never receive your message.
Monitor your deliverability metrics closely: bounce rates, spam complaint rates, and inbox placement. These tell you whether you have permission to even be in the conversation.
Look Beyond the Inbox
The goal of emailing your church isn’t to have people open your email. The real impact of your email is what happens outside the inbox.
We need to start tracking the real-world indicators. Did more people sign up for the conference after the email was sent? Did the event in the newsletter have a higher attendance than others? Were more prayer request forms submitted after you hit send?
We we start to look at our calls to action outside the inbox we gain a better picture of the effectiveness of our emails.
What You Should Actually Track
If not open rates, then what?
Deliverability first. Make sure your emails are actually reaching inboxes. This is your foundation.
Click-through rates. People who click are demonstrably engaged. This is a more reliable signal than opens.
Conversion rates. Did recipients take the action you wanted? Signups, form submissions, downloads—these are concrete outcomes.
List growth and churn. Are you growing a healthy, engaged audience, or are people quietly unsubscribing?
The Bottom Line
Open rates aren't useless. They can still provide directional insight for subject line testing or spotting major delivery problems. But treating them as a primary KPI in 2025 is like navigating with a broken compass. You might feel like you know where you're going, but you're probably just going in circles.
Focus on deliverability to ensure you're even in the game. Then look at the real-world actions people take, both inside and outside your emails, to understand whether your strategy is actually working.
Your people might never trigger that tracking pixel, but if they're engaging with your ministry, does it really matter whether their email client loaded a 1x1 transparent image?
Probably not.