What is a good email open rate, and can I trust the number?

An open is recorded when a tiny invisible image in the email loads. That method was always imperfect, because people who block images never count as opens. Since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021, it has become misleading in the other direction too: Apple Mail can download the images in advance on the reader's behalf, so the platform logs an open whether or not the person looked. Some corporate security systems do something similar when they scan links and images.

That is why we do not quote a target open rate, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. Published industry averages mix countries, list ages and how each platform handles machine opens, so comparing your number with them tells you little. What open rate is still good for is comparing your own emails with each other: if one subject line gets a clearly higher open rate than the last ten on the same list, it probably did something right.

Better measures depend on what the email is for. A store should look at clicks to product pages and orders attributed to the campaign, ideally with UTM-tagged links so Google Analytics records them. A school or clinic should look at replies and bookings. A B2B firm in Islamabad sending a monthly update should count replies, meeting requests and forwards. Unsubscribe and spam-complaint rates matter too, because they show whether you are sending too often or to the wrong people.

If opens fall sharply across every campaign at once, the cause is usually deliverability, not copy: emails moving to spam after a domain or authentication change. Check that before rewriting your subject lines.