Most email platforms greet you with a dashboard full of numbers. A few of them tell you whether your email is working. Others look impressive and mean very little.
Why open rates can't be trusted any more
In 2021 Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection. For people who switch it on in Apple Mail, Apple loads each email's images in the background — including the tiny image platforms use to count opens — so an email can show as "opened" whether or not anyone read it. Image blocking and other privacy tools skew the numbers too.
Treat open rate as a rough signal at best. Don't judge a campaign on it, and don't pick subject-line test winners on opens alone — use clicks.
The numbers worth watching
- Click rate — the share of recipients who clicked something. A far better sign of interest than opens.
- Conversion rate — the share of recipients who went on to buy.
- Revenue per recipient — the revenue an email brought in, divided by the number of people it went to. It lets you compare a big campaign with a small, targeted one fairly.
- Flow revenue vs campaign revenue — how much comes from your automated flows compared with one-off sends. If flows bring in very little, that's usually the quickest win.
- List growth — new subscribers minus the people who left, each month.
- Unsubscribes and spam complaints — some unsubscribes are normal; complaints are a warning sign. Keep complaints well under 0.1% (the deliverability guide explains why).
- Bounce rate — if it's rising, there are old or mistyped addresses on your list.
Compare against yourself, not someone else's average
Industry benchmarks vary enormously by product, price and list size, and many are still inflated by those unreliable opens. Your own numbers over time are the benchmark that matters: is revenue per recipient going up? Is the list growing? Are complaints staying low?
Be careful with "email revenue"
Email platforms usually credit a sale to an email if the customer bought within a few days of opening or clicking it. That window is a setting — check what yours is — and remember that inflated opens can inflate the revenue figure too. Counting only sales after a click gives you the more cautious, more honest number.
A simple monthly check-in
Once a month, look at four things: revenue per recipient for your campaigns, revenue from each flow, list growth, and your complaint rate. If one moves the wrong way, you'll know where to look.
Want a clear monthly report instead of a confusing dashboard? That's part of how we work — book a strategy call.
