Your Open Rate Is Lying To You

Open rates have been the default measure of email performance for years. Ann wrote this piece to challenge that — Apple Mail pre-fetches emails and marks them as opened before the reader ever sees them. Corporate email scanners do the same. Proxy servers trigger pixels automatically.

The post broke down which metrics actually reflect engagement: click-through rate, reply rate, unsubscribe patterns, and revenue per email. It's part of an ongoing editorial series on email marketing Ann runs on LinkedIn.

The piece performed well with founders and marketers who had been optimising for a number that wasn't telling them what they thought it was.