How to Get the Most Out of Your Open Rate Data
Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights reported on email marketing open rates across all sectors and all types of emails.
Without a doubt, this kind of benchmarking is an excellent contribution to the email marketing community (#emailgeeks) and beyond. But like fire, benchmarking can be both helpful and dangerous depending on how you use it. In today’s world of privacy protection and AI-driven inboxes, a few caveats about open rates need to be laid out so email marketers can interpret the data intelligently.
Because the truth is… open rates don’t mean what they used to, and even when you look at reports in your email marketing tools, you can probably toggle the view in a few ways. For example, ActiveCampaign's BotSense filtering tool comes to mind.
Let’s unpack how to think about them today.
Are You an Email Marketing Gold Medalist?
1️⃣ Email marketing is like running. I.e., it's an individual sport that you need to compare yourself to yourself – not to an Olympic gold medalist. 🥇
Industry reports like the Smart Insights benchmark are useful for understanding the broader landscape. But if your open rates don’t match the report, don’t panic.
In fact, in the modern email ecosystem, benchmarks have become less reliable than ever.
Why?
Because Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), Gmail image proxying, and automated security scans now generate machine opens that inflate open rate numbers. Many email platforms report these automated opens the same way they report human ones.
So instead of obsessing over how you compare to industry benchmarks, the most important comparisons are still the ones inside your own program:
• Month over Month (MoM) open trends
• Year over Year (YoY) open trends
• Campaign-to-campaign comparisons
These internal benchmarks help you answer the real question:
Is my audience becoming more engaged… or less engaged?
If your trend line is dropping, something likely needs attention — maybe subject lines, maybe segmentation, maybe inbox placement.
If your trend line is rising, great… but don’t celebrate too early.
Because the next point might burst your bubble.
Are You an Email Marketing Unicyclist?
2️⃣ Open rates can be easily manipulated by segmentation and targeting strategies. So don't cut your list too much to inflate your open rates. Finding your equilibrium is critical! ⚖
Think about the last time you asked someone:
“Hey, did you get a chance to look at that email I sent?”
And they responded:
“Of course I did. I was just about to reply.”
That’s a 100% open rate and 100% engagement rate.
If you only send emails to your most engaged contacts, you can replicate that result at scale. Your open rates will look incredible.
But your business impact might shrink dramatically.
This is where a concept developed by marketing research pioneer Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABS becomes incredibly relevant: the Quality vs Quantity lever.
In simple terms:
• Tighten targeting too much → your list becomes tiny
• Expand targeting too broadly → engagement drops and sender reputation suffers
The art of email marketing is balancing those two forces.
Nowadays, this balancing act has become even more important because mailbox providers now use AI-driven engagement signals to determine inbox placement.
That means your targeting decisions influence not just engagement… but deliverability itself.
So instead of chasing vanity metrics, focus on sustainable list health:
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Book a Free Strategy Call• Compare active segment campaigns to active segment campaigns
• Compare lapsed segment campaigns to lapsed segment campaigns
• Track engagement depth over time
Think of it like riding a unicycle.
Lean too far in either direction — quality or quantity — and the whole system falls over.
Balance is everything.
Are You a Pragmatic Email Marketer?
3️⃣ Finally, marketers can easily get lost in the numbers, i.e., too many numbers. For example, I find the click-thru to open ratio (CTOR) a lot more effective than the overall click rate. And another metric I calculate is the effective engagement rate.
In today’s privacy-first email environment, open rates are best treated as directional indicators, not definitive engagement signals.
So what should you look at instead?
One metric I’ve always liked is Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR), which measures how effectively your email converts interest into action.
But even CTOR alone isn’t enough.
Another metric I like to calculate is what I call the Effective Engagement Rate.
Here’s the formula:
Effective Engagement Rate = Open Rate × CTOR
Why is this helpful?
Because it gives you a single snapshot of campaign performance that combines both visibility and interaction.
It also allows you to compare campaigns with wildly different send volumes — whether you’re sending to 2,000 contacts or 200,000.
And it highlights something many marketers miss:
High open rates do not always lead to high engagement.
You can write a brilliant subject line that generates curiosity clicks… but if the content inside the email doesn’t deliver value, engagement collapses.
That’s why the modern optimization loop looks like this:
Subject Line → Open Intent
Email Content → Click Intent
Landing Page → Conversion Intent
If any one of those breaks, performance drops.
Remember, it is imperative to optimize your subject lines accordingly because higher open rates do not necessarily equate to better engagement rates.
Now that you’ve made it this far, I hope you know what type of email marketer you are. Plus, use the abovementioned ideas and look at the Smart Insights article with your “smarketing” glasses. Go on and learn about email marketing open rates across all sectors.
Working with brands spending $50k–$500k/month on paid media. I bring 20+ years of experience, $10M+ in managed ad spend, and 10,000+ hours in email to every engagement.
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