Your email open rate is lying to you. And most marketers still don't know it.
Here's what's actually happening behind the scenes.
Since 2021, Apple has been automatically "opening" your emails on behalf of its users. The feature is called Mail Privacy Protection, and what it does is simple: before your email even reaches someone's eyes, Apple pre-loads it on its own servers, which fires your tracking pixel and registers an "open." The subscriber may have never even touched it.
Now consider this: according to Litmus, Apple Mail accounts for nearly 49% of all email opens as of early 2025. And 64% of Apple Mail users have this protection enabled. That means a huge chunk of your "opened" emails were never actually read by a human.
MailerLite analyzed over 3.6 million campaigns in 2025 and found an average open rate of 43.5% across all industries. That number sounds great. But it's inflated by machines, not people.
So what should you actually be tracking?
Click rate. This is the one metric Apple cannot fake. If someone clicked a link in your email, a human made that decision. The average click rate in 2025 sits at just 2.09%, which might look small compared to your open rates, but it's real. It tells you who is genuinely interested, what content works, and which calls to action are landing.
Beyond clicks, look at click-to-open rate (CTOR), conversion rate from email, and replies. These are the signals that tell a real story.
And then there's the grey email problem, which most brands completely ignore.
Grey emails (sometimes called graymail) are messages people signed up for but no longer want. They don't mark them as spam. They just… don't open them. Over time, this tanks your sender reputation with email providers like Gmail and Yahoo, which then starts sending your emails to the promotions tab or even to spam, including for the people who DO want to hear from you.
The fix is a clean grey list strategy: segment your inactive subscribers (say, no engagement in 90 days), run a targeted re-engagement campaign to remind them why they signed up, give them one clear choice to stay or go, and then remove the ones who don't respond. A smaller, engaged list always outperforms a big, cold one.
The Litmus State of Email 2025 report found that 15% of marketers still use open rate as their primary success metric. In a world where Apple is opening emails for us, that's like measuring how many people looked at your shop window while counting reflections.
Email marketing still delivers some of the best ROI of any channel, around $36 for every $1 spent. But that only holds true if you're reading the data correctly.
Stop chasing open rates. Start chasing clicks, actions, and replies.
Those are the people actually listening.