What email marketing metrics actually matter and how should you report on them?
Why open rate is no longer trustworthy, and what to report to a leadership team instead.
Report clicks, replies, meetings booked, pipeline and revenue. Open rate is no longer a reliable measure, because mail apps preload images whether or not anyone read the message.
Why open rate broke
Opens are counted by a tracking pixel loading. Apple describes its Mail Privacy Protection feature as downloading remote content in the background by default, regardless of whether you engage with the email, and as routing that content through relays so the sender does not see your IP address. That means a meaningful share of your recorded opens are machines, not people, and your open rate is inflated by an amount that varies with your audience mix.
Open rate is not useless, it is just not comparable across time or audiences. Treat it as a rough signal for a same-day subject line test on one large list, and never as a performance metric on a report.
What to report instead
- Click rate and click-to-delivery rate. A person clicked. That happened.
- Replies, especially on sales sequences. The most underrated email metric there is.
- Conversions, the specific action the email asked for: meeting booked, form submitted, order placed.
- Pipeline and revenue influenced, attributed in the CRM, not the email tool.
- List health: unsubscribe rate, hard bounce rate, and spam complaint rate. Google's sender guidelines tell senders to stay below 0.10 percent spam rate and never reach 0.30 percent, so put complaint rate on the monthly report and treat it as a leading indicator.
- Revenue per thousand sent, which is the only number that lets you compare a small engaged list to a big one honestly.
Report it in the CRM, not the email tool
An email platform dashboard can only tell you about email. Leadership does not care about email, they care about which channels produce customers. When email reporting lives alongside paid, organic and sales activity on the same contact and deal records, you can answer the real question, which is what the mix is doing together. That is a reporting architecture decision, covered on our data and analytics page, with practical GA4 examples in our GA4 use cases post.
And test properly. Two variables changed at once tells you nothing, method in our A/B testing guide.
Related: Do you provide monthly reporting for paid campaigns?. How do you track leads and conversions from paid campaigns?. What data and analytics services does LevelUp Digital offer?.